


Liminal

by redroslin



Series: The Laura Roslin soul mate AUs [7]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Non-Linear Narrative, Slow Burn, Soulmate song-in-head AU, past Dee/Billy, past Dee/Lee, past Laura Roslin/Richard Adar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:29:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24391339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redroslin/pseuds/redroslin
Summary: They had both cared about Billy, but that didn't make them anything to one another.In which Dee and Laura pass like ships in the night, meet under duress, meet again, help each other through hard times, judge and misjudge each other; and take approximately forever and a half to figure out that they're soul mates.And even longer to realize they have actualfacts feelings for one another.Or that someone might want to do something about that, maybe.
Relationships: Anastasia "Dee" Dualla/Laura Roslin, Dee & Lee, background Lee/Kara/Sam
Series: The Laura Roslin soul mate AUs [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1316222
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to CC for the thoughtful beta!

GALACTICA SICKBAY

230 DAYS AFTER CYLON ATTACK ON THE TWELVE COLONIES

Laura was standing over Billy's body, looking down at his cold, pale face, when her soul mate began to hum.

The song was a traditional Sagittaron healing psalm--one of the repetitive hymns that could circle for hours in Laura's head, echoed back and forth between her thoughts and her soul mate's. A prayer for peace, for the dead and for the grieving. As it built and resonated under Laura's skin in her soul mate's clear soprano, it felt like comfort; it felt like a lifeline.

She _wasn't_ alone. She wasn't going to drown.

But Billy, poor Billy--

She looked down at his corpse and felt her knees give out and tears start to come. Bill Adama had left her with Billy's cold body and her lonely grief some minutes ago--or an hour, or two, she'd lost all sense of time--but her soul mate was still here. Was out there _somewhere_. Was inside her head and reciting a hymn somewhere in the fleet, the soft mental hum finding its way to Laura when she needed it most.

 _Thank you_ , she thought, knowing she'd never be heard. _Thank you._

Laura's soul mate wasn't singing for Billy. There was no way she could have known about him; it was sheer coincidence. Still, it was a comfort.

By the second psalm, Laura felt self-possessed enough to join in on the chorus. She added her low alto to her soul mate's lilting cadence and heard the measured rhythm falter for a beat as the other woman heard her. Then the murmur strengthened, her soul mate falling into descant harmony with Laura's precise rote recital.

This one was the prayer for restoration, if memory served, though Laura's ancient Sagittaron was all but nonexistent, and her meticulously researched notes on Saggitaron's music and folklore had been left behind on Caprica. Despite knowing only fragments of its meaning, there was a sense of renewal in the music; a feeling of calm, and of being held.

Still, when Laura opened her eyes at the end of the second hymn and caught sight of Billy's grey, bloodless face--his face, which would never smile again, or laugh, or affect the bumbling exasperation he always wore when she teased him about his pretty soldier girlfriend--

Oh, gods, and he had been about to propose to Dualla. Oh, no.

Gods, it hurt. It hurt, but it was a pain that she could feel, now, thanks to her soul mate's presence. The hymns had cracked open something inside that bled real feelings instead of the stark, bleak cold that was all she'd known since she'd heard about Billy.

Heard about Billy's _death_.

There. She'd thought the word.

The sound of a boot scuffing against the metal deck jarred her out of her thoughts, and she turned too fast, almost dizzy with shock and grief--and possibly low blood sugar, too, though the gods knew when she'd be able to keep anything down. She steadied herself against the wall just as Lieutenant Dualla stepped through the door to the morgue.

"Madam President," Dualla said softly. "I hope it's okay if I--I wanted to--"

"Of course," Laura told her. "I can give you a moment alone with--with him, if you'd like?"

"That's all right. There's no need for you to go."

The young woman moved to his side and stared down at him, her face frozen in... was that determination? Self-recrimination? It was hard to say. Unlike Laura, Dualla didn't reach for him, didn't test the coolness of his skin or smooth the lock of hair that still wanted to curl over his forehead. She simply stood there and looked.

"I told him I couldn't marry him," Dualla said at last, without turning away from the body. "I told him I couldn't marry him, and now he's dead."

"Oh, _Billy_ ," Laura said, aching for him--and for Dualla. And then, "I'm sorry."

"Don't," Dualla told her. "I don't deserve your sympathy."

"He wouldn't want you to blame yourself."

"You don't know that."

"I do." She reconsidered the truth of her words in light of Dualla's skepticism. "I believe it, at least. He wouldn't want you to blame yourself for something that wasn't your fault, no matter what had passed between you before it happened. You didn't kill him."

"I know--" Dualla said, her voice breaking. "Don't you think I know that?"

Laura felt the irrational impulse to wrap her arms around this virtual stranger, to pull her close and shelter her from the world.

She wasn't going to. She didn't know Dualla. But she suddenly, fiercely, wanted to hold her--to protect her--and that instinct alone was unsettling. They had both cared about Billy, but that didn't make them anything to one another.

"I think you know that you weren't responsible," Laura said, aware the words were inadequate before they left her lips. "But knowing doesn't make it better, does it?"

"He died to save me," Dualla said with a catch in her voice. "He was so _stupid_. And it feels like it's my fault."

"I know."

Reaching for the peace she'd felt a moment earlier, Laura internally--and perfectly silently--began to hum the opening bars of the one of the martial Sagittaron dirges she'd learned two decades and a lifetime ago. She had the uncanny sense that her soul mate was leaning in, listening avidly, before she felt the other's sweet mental hum rise above hers in grief-fueled harmony.

Dualla had fallen silent, and Laura wondered if she ought to turn away and give the younger woman some privacy, despite the assurance that it wasn't necessary. Out of apathy, if nothing else, she stayed, standing by the wall and humming a dirge only her soul mate could hear as she watched Dualla hover over Billy's body. She was so young, Laura thought. So careful with the corpse of the man she'd loved, but hadn't loved enough.

As the last bars of the lament swept through her, Laura cleared her throat and stepped forward to stand next to Dualla again. "You weren't the one holding the gun."

"The Admiral said the same thing."

Laura felt something like a grimace twist her face and was relieved that Dualla didn't seem inclined to look over.

"Does it make me a horrible person," Laura asked softly, the words drawn from somewhere deep inside, "that even though I'm unspeakably relieved that Captain Apollo is going to be all right, I'm furious that _his_ son survived and my--my-- _Billy_ didn't?"

"No," Dualla said, equally softly. "I don't think that makes you a horrible person."

"Hmm," Laura mused. "Because I think it probably does."

"You're allowed to grieve, Madam President."

She bit back a response and thought that it was probably better no one see this particular ill-favoured expression, either. She reached out a hand and took hold of one of Dualla's, gripping it tightly. "So are you."

Dee was certain of two things. Two facts, firm and immutable, that held her feet to Galactica's deck and kept her from spinning off bodily to parts unknown.

First: Billy was dead.

Second: He hadn't been her soul mate.

Not even a little. Not a chance of it.

And neither was Lee. That made three things, she supposed, though who the frak was keeping count anyway.

But Billy had died, and Lee had nearly died, and here she was at Lee's bedside and--it was hard, that's all.

It hurt. It hurt a lot.

She knew how unhinged she sounded. She knew it was ridiculous to sit here babbling at Lee as he passed out again in his hospital bed.

But she was so scared at how easily she could have lost them both. Worse, it would be her fault if she had. Her fault that Lee had been with her on Cloud Nine and in that bar. Her fault that Billy had stopped on his way home when he saw them. Her fault he'd jumped in front of an armed man to protect her. Her fault, all of it, and her fault they'd both been shot.

"You have to stay," she told Lee, begged him, and for now he kept breathing.

He stayed, when no one else would stay with her. No one else had ever wanted to.

Except Billy. And Billy hadn't been hers, no matter how much she'd liked him or how easy it was to be what he wanted her to be.

But he wasn't her soul mate. The voice in her head was a woman's alto, warm and sure. She was confident and somber, strong and soft, and about as distant as Pythia's Earth.

Dee's soul mate, whoever she was, had a razor sharp memory and an even better ear, recalling arrangements almost note-perfect--but every so often she'd stumble, or forget half a verse, and Dee would hear her voice, raw and messy, blurring in around the edges of the rare song she couldn't quite reproduce. It was a rare treat to hear her think her way through lyrics, fumbling and open. She'd been the one constant in Dee's life for a very long time.

But she still wasn't _here_.

If Dee wanted a friend to confide in or a warm body to shelter against--well, she wasn't going to get either from her blasted soul mate, who plainly wanted no part of her. If she needed someone to hold her hand while she visited Lee as he recovered from surgery, his face so wan and fragile--everything and nothing like Billy's dead corpse on the morgue table in the next room--

Tough luck, soldier. You're on your own.

Billy was gone, and Lee wasn't her soul mate, either. Dee almost wished--almost, nearly, but not quite--that she could change her fate and choose Lee, choose his kindness and decency, instead of some stranger who didn't care enough to even try to find her.

It didn't matter. She couldn't choose who her soul mate was. She couldn't argue with destiny, and she wasn't going to try.

The only person she could argue with was Lee.

What she'd told Lee on Cloud Nine earlier--yesterday?--when she'd been sugar-coating everything, when she'd thought she had a shot at something foolish and ridiculous--hadn't been true: she knew just what to make of her relationship with Billy. And the one with Lee, too.

Maybe in another universe, one where she wasn't half in love with a woman she'd never met, she might have been confused by Billy's earnest goodness or Lee's raw idealism. She might have loved or frakked or even married one or the other of them. In this universe, though, the looming spectre of her soul mate meant she could never give herself fully to anyone else. No matter how kind Billy's eyes were or how drawn she felt to Lee, she didn't _want_ them--not really. She wanted the mystery woman on the other end of her soul, the woman with the smoky voice and terrible taste in Caprican rock. The one who'd all but sung a dirge for Billy as Dee stared down at his corpse.

How had her soul mate _known_?

How had she known that Billy was dead, to sing a lament for him?

Better question, after the way her elusive soul mate been avoiding Dee for months: What the frak did she even _care_?

 _How dare_ _she_ hum along with Dee's hymns, how dare she offer a mourning elegy, how dare she show up now and offer her support--and it made Dee furious to catch herself using words like "show up" and "support" to describe behaviour that was neither _present_ nor in any practical way _actually_ _supportive_ \--when the other woman had never responded to Dee's queries and obviously wanted nothing to do with her.

How _dare_ she. The very temerity.

Despite everything, though, there was something Dee found so godsdamn reassuring about knowing that her soul mate was on deck, in some small way, in the wake of this crisis. Knowing the woman existed somewhere and that she cared, even a little.

But Dee knew these hints of a bond between them were crumbs, and it wasn't enough, and it would never be enough. And she was and always had been so alone. And she was lonely.

Enter Billy. Enter Lee.

So Dee had a terrible soul mate who refused to be found. She didn't need romantic love; what she wanted more than anything was... companionship. Someone she could count on, someone she could trust. Billy had asked more than that of her, and it had strained her relationship with him further than it could bear. But Lee--Lee seemed like someone who might understand what she needed and, just as important, might grasp the ideals that drove her, the broken places she guarded, the fears that kept her up at night.

Not to mention, he was smoking hot and fiercely competent, and those weren't qualities to be underestimated.

No matter how well they complemented each other, Lee wasn't for her. But maybe he'd understand if, this time, she told him the truth.

He was awake the next day when Dee visited sickbay, and she was so relieved to see him upright and alert, colour back in his cheeks, that she lost any semblance of a verbal filter and just blurted it out.

"I was being coy on Cloud Nine, but I don't want to be coy with you any more." Shit. Words. She needed more words.

"All right," Lee said gamely, but she knew him well enough to read caution in the sudden tension around his eyes and hate herself for causing it. "Shoot."

He looked tired. The bullet wound in his chest was still closing. Maybe she should wait.

If she couldn't find the nerve now, she thought, she never would.

"I have a soul mate," she told him. "I want to be with her but she doesn't want me."

"That's--I'm sorry," Lee said. "I didn't know. Did Billy...?"

"Not until he proposed to me. I'm trying to preempt that mistake here."

"I see."

He didn't. Not yet.

"I should have told Billy from the start," she explained, "so I'm telling you from the start. I don't want a boyfriend. I like you and I think we could have some fun together, but I don't want you to think this is anything more than that. What I want from you is a friend--and maybe someone to blow off steam with, once in a while."

"Got it," Lee said, smirking in abrupt understanding. "Occasional steam friend. Not boyfriend. Check."

She laughed. That had gone over better than she'd dared to hope. "Good."

"Good." He grinned back at her.

The first time they slept together, Lee unwound enough in the aftermath to say, "I should probably tell you. I'm in love with someone else, too."

"How convenient," Dee muttered into his shoulder. It wasn't like it was a surprise, or anything.

And it _was_ pretty damn convenient for her.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

TWO DAYS AFTER CYLON ATTACK ON THE TWELVE COLONIES

Laura left the funeral service on Galactica feeling more alone than ever.

If you had told her twenty years ago that she would miss having someone rattling around in her head--well, Laura had come to rely on knowing her soul mate was there, that was all. It wasn't like she needed her. It wasn't like they had ever been more to each other than a murmur in the dark.

But it was very dark in space, she was finding, and she could have used that fragile glimmer of hope. A hand to hold in the darkness.

She reminded herself that she was responsible for humanity's survival, now, and that she could not afford to need anything of the kind.

With the Colonies gone, her soul mate had to be dead. It would be insane for her to consider any other possibility.

But all through her mother's illness, and even after the car crash that had taken the rest of her family, Laura had always had the music to turn to... and the stranger on the other end of it.

It was hard to shed the habit of a lifetime--a habit of reaching out and knowing that someone would hear her if she dared to sing.

No one was out there for her now. Not any more.

She was mounting the ramp into the smaller vessel that would return her to Colonial One, when she thought she heard--

No, she must have imagined it.

Laura held her breath and listened.

A shiver in the back of her mind, a heartbeat's echoing silence, and then--

A single cycle, just three quiet bars, of the Caprican mantra Elosha had led the fleet in reciting less than an hour earlier.

Laura's heart leapt into her throat; her heel slipped on the ramp and she nearly lost her balance and fell to Galactica's deck.

Frak. It wasn't possible. It couldn't be.

She froze, listening as hard as she could for another sound. She heard people bustling around her, dignitaries climbing aboard ships to leave Galactica after the memorial. Inside, though, she couldn't hear a damn thing. _Anything, anything, give me godsdamn Scorpian drumming, Aerilon rock, anything, please--_

Someone slammed a raptor's boarding ramp closed, and Laura jumped.

From inside her head, only silence.

Heart in her throat, she started up the ramp again.

She'd imagined it. There was precisely zero chance--her soul mate had to be dead.

Despite the futility of it, she couldn't stop herself from humming the next few lines of Elosha's mournful chant. No one was listening. It wouldn't make any difference. But if it made no difference, then it was also true that no one was out there to judge her for it, or to call her a fool for letting the dirge roll through her mind, sweet and true and with only the slightest wobble.

She almost choked on air when she heard the hum echoed back at her in a light, clear soprano.

Oh, gods. _She was alive_.

She was alive _and in the fleet_.

GALACTICA, C DECK

EIGHT DAYS SINCE CYLON ATTACK ON THE COLONIES

There was no complete list of survivors, not yet, so Specialist Socinus told Dee to stick the photos of her family to the message board in the adjacent hall--one of the big pin boards, which had been filled so thoroughly past capacity that scraps of paper and photographs had begun to spill to either side and had gradually taken over most of the corridor. It had barely been a week since the attacks and already the hallway was a mess of desperation and grief, pictures and heartfelt pleas for any news of loved ones, siblings, exes, children.

Gods. What were the odds that any of these lost souls had survived?

Dee almost couldn't bear to part with her photos--what if they got damaged, or went missing?--but she couldn't stand to do nothing, either. She dutifully tacked them into a gap on the wall and made a heartfelt wish that a comprehensive list of survivors' names would be available soon.

She had to wait and hold out hope.

Someone with a less conflicted relationship with the gods might even have prayed.

Dee turned at a muffled sound a few feet behind her, but there was no one. In the corner of her mind, the flicker of noise turned into a breath of sound, a rising scatter of soft pianoforte and then a blur of harp. Virgon classical music with perfect concert hall acoustics, the like of which the survivors from the Colonies might never hear again, ruffled down the connection from her soul mate and into Dee's inner ear.

Dee had known since the funeral that somehow, against all the odds, her Caprican soul mate had survived the attack. Dee's family might be gone--she was a realist and she knew the odds were against them--but her soul mate had survived, and that. That wasn't nothing.

Dee held her breath until she felt dizzy and clung to the peals of classical music until it trailed off into silence.

She came back the next day to check on her photos and discovered that an arm's width of the opposite wall had been set aside and titled, in ugly block capitals inked with a marker on the durasteel, _MATCHMAKER WALL_. Beneath that heading were a half-dozen notes from survivors seeking their soul mates.

Some notes were brief and to the point:

_Lights on Delphi, the morning of the attack. Ain't No Sunshine, two days after the attack._

Others were more inventive:

 _I heard you last night_ , one letter began, _listening to Prophecy's Child. I'm sure you're Bootylicious and if you'll give me half a chance I'd love to Say Your Name. Or scream it! --Lonely On Galactica_

In the margins of the same sheet of paper, someone had replied:

_Dear LOG,_

_I know you heard my headset from your rack, and you can frak right off about my taste in music._

_Sincerely, Not If Hell Froze Over_

Dee scrounged a pen and paper from the pilot's lounge--trying not to wonder where they were going to get more of either when ship stores ran out--and carefully wrote:

_Cap-pop, the night before the attacks._

_Virgon classical music, 8 days after the attacks._

_Tell me what the two songs in your head were and let's talk._

No one would ever reply--to that or to Dee's later messages.

COLONIAL ONE

31 DAYS AFTER THE ATTACK

Laura couldn't afford to be selfish.

The survival of the human race was on her shoulders. She was Pythia's _humble leader_ , she was the o _ne who has been lifted from a life of obscurity to lead humanity to the promised land,_ and the disbelievers would have to suffer through their opinions ("Humble leader is an oxymoron!" Billy insisted more than once) and live with her in charge--because there was no one else who could take them to Earth, and Laura was certainly not planning to roll over and let Zarek claim the title of humble leader in her stead. Not going to happen.

She couldn't afford to be selfish. She couldn't lose focus. Her soul mate would have to wait.

So she avoided the so-called Matchmaker boards, and though she drew comfort from daily brushes with her soul mate's quicksilver soprano, she didn't dwell on them.

Elosha thought that she was being too abstentious.

"Even a born leader needs a support system," she told Laura. "You're asking too much of yourself. You can't always put your own needs last. There is such a thing as _too much_ humility."

"It's not humility," Laura told her.

"Then what is it?"

"Practicality. Hypervigilance. Our survival has to come first."

"And what about _your_ survival?"

"I'm surviving."

"And what about your emotional and spiritual survival?"

Laura smiled grimly. "Emotional survival doesn't feed the fleet or find us a home."

She still thought about Richard, sometimes, when she felt desperately lost and alone.

He hadn't saved her. No one could have saved her, after Dad and Sandy and Cheryl. It only felt like he had. Richard hadn't done much, except--what he had done seemed so significant, so desperately wanted, that it filled up all the spaces in her soul that weren't bleeding to death in a shattered SUV or focused on her own mere survival.

Laura had cut herself off from everyone, from everything, in the wake of the accident. She had locked herself down and frozen all the moving parts of her heart, all the parts that could tremble. But Richard--somehow, in some indefinable way that she could never pin down, either during or afterward--somehow Richard Adar had charmed his way through the tundra and found what was left of her.

He asked so little, was the thing. He asked so little and then he gave it all back, no more and no less, and by the time Laura realized that she should be cautious, well, he was all the way inside her walls, taking up a measure of her desiccated heart out of all proportion with reason. And by that point there was no sense, really, in pushing him away.

Months since his death, and she still thought of him, sometimes, when her body ached for a friendly touch and she felt starved for someone to hold and be held by.

She thought of Richard, and wrapped her arms around herself in her cot, and tried to remember what it had been like to have something other than the weight of the worlds on her shoulders.

"Humble leader is _by definition_ an oxymoron!" Billy had argued, as he always did.

Laura raised one eyebrow and waited him out.

"Fine, it's not an oxymoron. But it is the worst kind of political nonsense rhetoric, and it's hypocritical to go around branding yourself as humble."

"I didn't. Pythia did."

"Spoken like a _really_ humble servant of the people."

Laura shrugged at him, unrepentant.

"Have it your way," he said, shuffling papers. "But I still think it's absurd."

"So do I," she admitted. "But if the shoe fits..."

"And what about the parts of Pythia that say the humble leader was saved from a wasting disease by a visionary from a foreign land?"

"Well, I'm not wasting away," Laura told him. "And I haven't met any prophets--other than the ones in the scrolls themselves. So who the hell knows?"

It had been in a conversation with Lee, in her earliest days aboard Colonial One, that Laura had learned about the matchmaker message boards.

They'd been chatting about--gods, who even knew any more, probably some inexplicable thing Adama had said the day before--when Billy had walked in with a stack of folders and a cautious wince.

"I have those morale figures you were asking for, Madam President."

She'd nodded, probably. "Sit down, Billy. Let's hear it."

The data on fleet morale wasn't good, but as Billy went through the report it became clear that it wasn't as dire as she'd feared. People were scared but they were also, more often than not, working together to forge community out of the chaos. The survivor lists were finished and several members of Galactica's crew had been reunited with family on other ships; the press was already spinning them as success stories in the midst of tragedy and doing half the work for her of keeping hope alive in the fleet.

And then there were the ones who hadn't been able to find their missing loved ones.

"People know the survivors with family members are the lucky ones," Billy said, "but everyone's hoping they'll beat the odds, and Memorial Walls have been erected on other ships throughout the fleet like the one on Galactica."

Lee had been silent up to this point, but he chimed in now. "Memorial Wall has taken over an entire hallway on C Deck."

It was hard to imagine. Two days ago, it had been a few scattered photos on a bulkhead.

"I've seen it," Laura said, "in its infancy. It's good to have a place where people can post their hopes and also, maybe, begin to grieve their losses. I imagine people are using Memorial Hallway almost like a chapel?"

"Some are, I guess." Lee shook his head in dismay. "There's also a section they're calling Matchmaker Wall."

"Matchmaker Wall?"

Lee shrugged. "Kind of like the matchmaker services on the Colonies, but without an intermediary. More like a message board. People are posting songs they've heard since the Cylons attacked, and when they heard them; or sometimes just the songs, with the timing held back or with details missing, as security against soul mate fraud."

"There are intermediaries now," Billy corrected him, "but not matchmakers. Most ships in the fleet have a volunteer who photographs the boards every few days and shares the photos with their counterparts on other ships, trying to match people up. There've been a few soul mate pairs who've met that way already."

"Well, that's pretty inspiring," Laura said. "Love finds a way."

"Imagine finding your soul mate after the end of the world," Lee said.

"Imagine that," Laura echoed him. "Thank you, Billy. I'd appreciate updates if there are any new developments on the memorial hallways or matchmaker boards."

"Absolutely, Madam President." Gathering his files, Billy made his way aft toward his own smaller desk and what was becoming the de facto press hall.

"Gods. Matchmaker boards, now," she muttered to herself, imagining penning a note of some kind and-- _no_. There was no point in thinking about it.

When she glanced over, it was to find Lee staring blankly at the number on her whiteboard. "How many of those almost 48,000 survivors will turn out to have soul mates who also made it, do you think? Happy endings are going to be few and far between."

"Spoken like someone who..." She narrowed her eyes and pondered what she knew of her (favourite, only) military advisor. Hmm. "Doesn't have a soul mate?"

He smiled grimly. "Got it in one."

"Huh. You've never heard music? Echoes of loud sounds? Anything at all?"

"Nothing. Perfect silence up here." He tapped the side of his head.

"You think too loudly for that to be true," she said, with a smile to take the sting out of her words. "Then again, you're not missing much."

His gaze sharpened. "You have a soul mate?"

"I even have a soul mate who survived. But I can't saddle someone else with this." She gestured around at the trappings of the presidency. "Not now. Not when there's so much at stake."

"I have a feeling most people would disagree. They'd tell you to seize what you have left."

"They'd be wrong. I'm committed to humanity's survival, and that means I don't have the luxury of a personal life in the meantime."

"I can understand that. For what it's worth, though, I'm happy for you. That your soul mate is alive." He shrugged. "That has to be incredibly rare."

"Unless the gods planned for this and cherry-picked soul mate pairs who'd survive."

"And that, right there, is the kind of spiritual rabbit hole that I can't and won't follow you down, Madam President."

She shook her head and smiled despite herself. "That's probably wise."

CLOUD NINE

229 DAYS SINCE THE CYLON ATTACK

It was easy, later, for Dee to see how she'd come to the wrong conclusion. She'd wanted Lee to be just like her, so she'd let herself hear what she wanted to hear. And their date on Cloud Nine was so immediately overshadowed with death and guilt that she'd never looked back to question her assumptions later.

Lee had asked, "You have any siblings?"

She'd nodded. "Older brothers. One older sister. They were all on Sagittaron when the nukes fell. You? Just Zak?"

"Yeah." He looked around at a burst of laughter from a nearby table and turned back to her with a frown. "He was two years younger than me. Dead in a viper training accident years ago."

"I'm so sorry."

Lee shrugged off her concern. "It feels like a long time ago, now. He would have hated all of this."

It went unspoken that _everyone_ hated all of this.

"My dad," she confessed, because one turn of painful honesty deserved another, "was dead set against me joining the military. Wonder what he'd say now?"

Lee shrugged. "Well. This got dark fast."

She reconsidered painful honesty. Whoops. "...Sorry?"

"No, I'm the one who's sorry. I brought it down." Lee shook his head. "This isn't really any better, but: your thoughts on soul mates?"

He was right, that wasn't any better. Dee sighed. "Overrated."

"Overrated!" He laughed. "Agreed."

He slid his hand slowly across the table and she took it and smiled at him, and it was perfect.

They never touched on it again; she never asked him about his hypothetical overrated soul mate, and she didn't tell him anything salient about hers, about the woman on the other end of her heartbeat who hummed pop music and old Sagittaron hymns and everything in between, who liked to echo Dee's melodies in a warm, smoky alto but who refused to godsdamn come find Dee or to be found.

Gods, what kind of sadist was Dee's soul mate, what kind of cold bitch, who couldn't even be bothered to check the postings on Memorial Wall? Who didn't have the will to frakking reach out and find Dee already?

BATTLESTAR PEGASUS, IN ORBIT OVER NEW CAPRICA

THE FIRST YEAR AFTER THE INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT GAIUS BALTAR

Dee tried not to wonder what sex would be like with her soul mate, but sometimes... well.

The years on Pegasus were long and cold and lonely (particularly given that they hadn't _been_ years; it had been _a year_ that only felt like a decade). She didn't miss sleeping with Lee, not exactly--the sex had been nice but not rock-your-world amazing--but she missed the ease and comfort of having a friend she could drag into her rack when she needed someone to cling to. Having Lee as her friend and CO was better; still, it was hard not to feel touch-starved and to wonder whether the chain of command was worth it.

Dee couldn't be sure, not with any basis in fact, but somehow she _knew_ that her soul mate was on New Caprica. She knew it, and she ached to be with her--but there were 39,000 people on New Caprica, and she had no idea which one was hers. (Feeling cautiously optimistic, she'd posted another message on New Caprica City's Matchmaker Wall, and still no response. Frak it.)

She wasn't pining. Nor was she getting off every night daydreaming about her elusive soul mate. But once in a while, rattling around the hallways of an empty battlestar running a skeleton crew, she let herself think about it--the touch of another woman's hand, the way the curve of her soul mate's hip would fit in her palm, the softness of breasts and belly and thighs, the moan of a warm alto voice above her.

She wanted it. She wanted _her_.

And if on occasion she did lie in her rack, touching herself and pretending that her hands belonged to a hypothetical beautiful woman who was her perfect match and who would love her completely and totally for who she was--well, then, she definitely told herself every time that she had to stop, that it was a weakness, that it would never happen again.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

228 DAYS AFTER CYLON DESTRUCTION OF THE COLONIES

When Billy had pulled out that ring, gods. Dee had felt panicked, lightheaded, as if she'd stepped outside her body and--she couldn't breathe, couldn't think--just couldn't. She couldn't.

"I can't marry you," she gasped out at last. "I can't love you the way you want, Billy. _I have a soul mate_."

He stared at her blankly, as if this was the very last thing he could have imagined anyone saying to him when presented with a ring.

Gods. She was a terrible person.

"A soul mate?" he said finally.

"Yes. I'm sorry." She forced herself to look him in the eye.

"How do you know it isn't me?"

She sighed and felt as if she'd slipped back into her body on the exhale; as if the departing air made room for her soul to find its way back inside her chest. " _Billy_ ," she told him earnestly. "I wouldn't say it if I wasn't sure. I'm sorry. It isn't you."

He turned away and she knew he was fighting tears.

"I'm sorry," she said again, feeling helpless. "I'm so sorry."


	2. Chapter 2

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

IN THE DAYS AFTER THE CYLON ATTACK

The trouble with listening as hard as you can for something that may or may not be there is that you begin to hear things.

Dee had never been patient by nature, but in the aftermath of the Cylon attacks she grew frantic, obsessive, straining her inner ear at every opportunity for a sound that might never come again.

When she'd first landed on Caprica, she'd been certain she'd find her soul mate soon. But she hadn't. She'd completed basic training then kept picking up specializations like candy, not wanting to be assigned to orbit some distant world. She wasn't ready to leave Caprica yet. Her soul mate was _here_ , if she could only find her. How could Dee accept a posting anywhere else?

Helo had worn her down eventually with his cheerful reassurance that Galactica was a short term posting and she'd be back on the ground in two years. The Colonial service was understanding, but she couldn't keep treading water on campus, TAing classes forever. They'd force her to take a post eventually, and why not on Galactica, where she at least had friends?

She'd never regretted it and she didn't now--though you could argue that the rest of the fleet had had it easy, in the end--

Gods.

But now, well. Caprica was a burnt husk and Dee's soul mate was silent. Her soul mate was gone.

Dee listened desperately, endlessly, for any hint of sound. The echo of pressure changes in her ears. The pulse of a door slamming.

She began to accidentally overhear private conversations held at the limits of hearing range--Galactica's rumour mill had nothing on Dee's accidental eavesdropping. She started imagining snatches of melody, the sound of a ringing phone, emergency alarms, the wail of sirens, a voice calling her name. She hadn't slept well since the attacks but it wasn't fear or existential horror that was doing her in; it was listening, always listening, hoping for a whisper of something in the corners of her mind that might be lost for good.

Sleepless nights led to irritable days in a cycle she didn't know how to break. She'd catch herself staring off into space during her shift, or come to with her coffee cup half empty and no idea how it got that way. The worst was the time she jolted awake in her rack convinced that she'd heard a woman's voice in her ear, rasping, "I love you, Dee."

Wishful thinking. That was all.

It took only five days after the Cylon attacks for Dee to start hearing music in her head again. _Five days_. But they were the longest days of her life. And when she realized that what she was hearing was _real_ this time and not a figment of her exhausted imagination--gods, she almost burst into tears in the middle of the CIC.

She was alive. Her soul mate was _alive_.

COLONIAL ONE

TWELVE DAYS BEFORE THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

There was a meeting. Laura's life was composed of meetings and the spaces between them, but this one was unique in its size alone: All of the volunteers had been invited, every person helping to organize the human machinery of the first spacebound Colonial Presidential election--as well as the labour behind the requisite paper ballots, the boxes they would travel in, six transport raptors. An office supply store's worth of pens, pencils, and markers. Inkjet cartridges to print 50,000 voting cards. Marines to guard the transports. Volunteers to count the vote.

Someone had had the bright idea to play a recording of the Colonial anthem at the meeting, before the candidates spoke. Laura couldn't remember the last time she'd heard it--had it been at the service Elosha led to commemorate the Colonies? It had been less than a year, but the aftermath of the attacks already felt like another life.

Gods. So few months, and so many losses and griefs between that day and this one. Elosha should have been here. Elosha, and Billy.

She shouldn't be thinking in this morbid vein, not now, not when the future hinged on--

For a second, she heard a stutter in the music, an echo inside her skull, as if--

 _Oh,_ _no_.

 _She_ was here. She couldn't be here.

The anthem faded to a close.

Laura was supposed to speak. She needed to thank the volunteers for their presence and their commitment to democracy, to _humbly_ remind them of Pythia, to step into the role the scriptures had cast for her and celebrate the day--but she choked. She couldn't find her voice, not with the knowledge that her soul mate was in the room and would hear every word she said.

Laura wasn't ready, not to meet her--she couldn't, she didn't--

She looked down at her notes--when was the last time she'd had to refer to cue cards in front of a crowd, good gods--and she read the first line off the first card, and then the second line, and then the next.

And after her speech was done, after Baltar had said a few flamboyantly misleading words of his own, Laura stepped behind the curtain and covered her face with both hands, and she shook until she thought she might fly apart.

Her soul mate had been in that room. Laura wasn't ready. She wasn't prepared for any of this.

None of that mattered. She had an election to win.

OLD TAWA, SAGITTARON

25 YEARS BEFORE THE DESTRUCTION OF THE COLONIES

Anastasia was nearly eight years old when she managed to illicitly download a song recognition app to her cousin's phone and hum a few phrases of the tune that kept looping inside her head--something upbeat and weird and different, music that she'd been hearing for as long as she could remember.

The app took all of three seconds to ID that first song, but Stasia didn't stop there. Another song, and another, and pretty soon she had a list growing in her head. Caprican dance and techno music, pop songs that were easy to bootleg once she'd saved up enough cash mowing lawns to afford her own secondhand ePod--her playlists kept growing. And growing.

Equipped with her battered little ePod and a hand-me-down set of her brother's old earbuds--which she'd thoroughly sterilized before use, thank you very much, because boy cooties were gross and earwax was worse--she began a brief but intense love affair with Cap-pop that faceplanted abruptly into her older sister's scorn.

"Why are you listening to that crap, Stasie?" Liselle asked. "Turn it down before Mom hears or she'll take your ePod away."

"It's not crap."

"It is _too_ crap, and you'll be in trouble if Mom and Dad find out."

"Why? What's wrong with it?"

"It's debauched heathen music, that's what."

"But I hear it in my head."

Liselle gasped.

Stasia added stubbornly, "So it must be all right."

"What did you say."

Anastasia lowered her eyes to her ePod's scratched display. "I hear songs playing in my head, sometimes. That's why I got the ePod. So I could listen to them properly."

"Stase..." Liselle grabbed her hand and squeezed it.

"Stop it!"

Liselle didn't loosen her grip. "Promise me something. Promise you won't ever tell Mom or Dad what you just told me."

"Let go!"

"Promise me. You won't tell anyone."

"You're hurting my hand! And I wasn't going to tell anybody!" Her sister only glared at her until she conceded. "Fine! Fine, I promise. I won't."

"You can't tell them. They wouldn't understand." Shaking her head, she muttered under her breath, "Heaven knows I don't."

She kept her word until long after Liselle moved out to start her own household; until Jeremiah and Marvin were both in college; until Anastasia was old enough to understand for herself what her sister had been afraid of.

She never told another soul on Sagittaron about the music.

Half of the world didn't have a soul mate, or so the priests said. Believers, unbelievers, the blessed and the damned alike--only every second person of each tribe would ever have a soul mate. It was no mark of shame. It didn't matter, not really. She could find a good spouse and have a good marriage, her parents told her, even without a soul mate's music in her head.

Even someone who would never know true union, whose mind was completely their own, could have a good life.

Only Stasia knew she wouldn't be on Sagittaron to live that life.

She'd always known she was going to go to Caprica eventually, so it came as no surprise at all--and simultaneously something of a shock--when she walked past the military recruitment booth on campus, six months into her final year of a Masters in Communication, and realized that the largest training academy for the Colonial Forces was located on the outskirts of Caprica City.

She had always been destined to go to Caprica.

But she needed more time, needed to psych herself up and say her goodbyes--

She was 27 years old, stalling her parents' every well-intentioned attempt to marry her off by sheer force of will, and there was only so long she could keep vetoing suitors--

She needed _more time_ \--

But there was no time to waste.

Now was the only time she had.

Stasia boarded the flight to Caprica with the sound of jazz in her ears, sharp and uncomfortable and exquisitely frustrating. She preferred Cap-pop, hip hop, and even her soul mate's brief techno phase, but she supposed jazz was okay, too.

She wondered what her soul mate looked like and whether she would be as beautiful to the eye as her voice was in Stasia's thoughts.

When her flight landed in Caprica City, Anastasia somehow, naively, expected to walk off the shuttle and into her soul mate's arms.

Six years later, on the eve of Galactica's retirement, Dee listened to reports of the Colonies being nuked with tears rolling down her face and wondered if the person she had been would ever have left Sagittaron if she'd known it would come to this.

CAPRICA CITY

IN THE YEARS BEFORE THE ATTACK

Laura adored Richard.

That was the part Cheryl would never have understood.

Richard mattered, and not because he was her boss or her friend or even her infrequent lover.

For all his flaws--and Laura wasn't blind to them--he was so kind to her, so warm. She'd seen Richard Adar turn on the charm to get what he wanted from people: alternately berating and cajoling his staffers, wooing donors and political opponents alike. He was shamelessly manipulative and he always, always had an ulterior motive. It was _exhausting_.

He never did anything for less than two reasons, and he would bend the truth brazenly to achieve his goals, but--irrational or not, and she knew full well that it was irrational--he made her feel _safe_.

Laura hadn't felt safe in a long time.

Any way you looked at it, he was a problem. Before the accident, even if he'd been unattached, she'd never have dated a man like Adar. He was too focused, too self-obsessed. He never cared about anything unless it could benefit him.

But he wasn't unattached, and she knew she ought to feel an emotion of some kind about helping a man cheat on his wife. Laura didn't feel guilty, though, didn't feel much of anything except for the rasp of his stubble on her skin, his warm hands skimming her hips.

By morning he'd be clean-shaven and buttoned up, remote and businesslike behind his desk, as if the nighttime incarnation of Richard Adar had never existed. Meanwhile she wore the marks of his five o'clock shadow for days.

It was easy. She owed him nothing--not her time, not her attention, and certainly not her heart--and he owed her nothing in return. When she was with him, though, she was finally able to set everything else aside. He was her deserted island and she was naked in the sun, warm and held and not alone. When he touched her, her fears ran like beads of water condensing off a glass, dripping into the ocean, sparkling and vast.

He felt deep and unknowable, pressurized like the ocean's depths and dark as her own diminished heart.

And if, occasionally, she wished she was the kind of person who wanted something more, with someone more... well, she had the music for that.

She hadn't planned to fall in love with Richard. It just sort of... happened. One day they were frakking around in stolen moments, and the next year they weren't just frakking around.

She'd gone and fallen in love with her married frakking boss. _You're supposed to be smarter than this, Roslin_ , she chided herself. _You're supposed to know better._

She didn't know better. Obviously. She didn't really want to. Not when he was so kind, and so careful, and so good to her. Not when her heart was still mostly made of stone.

 _Still_ , the little voice in her head that sounded like Cheryl kept pointing out, _a good man wouldn't sleep with a member of his cabinet behind his wife's back, and you deserve more than a frakboi who needs to bolster his fragile masculine ego by wetting his dick in the company ink._

She didn't want to think about Cheryl and her endless attempts to pair Laura up with "someone amazing, someone who _deserves you_ , why do you date these jackasses, Laura, would it kill you to go on a date with a person you respect for once?"

So she hadn't meant to fall in love with Richard--and she hadn't fallen, not really, not enough to lose her mind for more than a minute or two--not enough to imagine that they might have a future. But she couldn't stop herself from noticing the way he looked at her sometimes, as if she was the only one who'd ever made it past his defenses, as if she mattered to him. It was more than gratifying. It was addictive.

It was a lie, like all of his lies. He wasn't what she needed. But he was _exactly_ what she wanted.

He relied on her. He made her feel appreciated, brilliant, desirable. He never asked for more than she was prepared to give.

And he kept her in a box, on a shelf in the back corner of his office, where he could take her down at whim to talk or play or frak or solve problems for him, and put her away when she was... inconvenient.

She got comfortable. She thought they could carry on like this indefinitely. She let herself imagine that she had his trust. And he took her loyalty and her respect, and he demanded her resignation over the bloody teacher's strike as if she were some intern who had gone off script.

Frak _that_.

 _You were right, Cher_ , she thought as she made her way home to pack for Galactica's retirement celebration. She wished she could play hooky and skip the damn thing, the way she'd skipped her physical last week; she might not have a career to return to after the damn ceremony was over, so why bother going through the motions?

Maybe _going through the motions_ was all she'd been equipped to do for... a long while now.

Her soul mate had the Colonial anthem in her mind as Laura packed, brassy and idealistic, and Laura couldn't help but laugh as she crammed another jacket into her suit bag.

 _To the stars we went_ , she hummed back. _Twelve worlds we founded on dreams._

On dreams and perseverance.

And spite.

If Richard wanted her resignation, well, he'd have to fight her for it.

BATTLESTAR PEGASUS

DURING THE CYLON OCCUPATION OF NEW CAPRICA

Dee and Lee figured themselves out slowly in the long, dark months after they abandoned New Caprica.

Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to rely on but each other--an experience like that changes a person. She'd never understood why the Admiral had chosen Dee of all people for Pegasus XO... but in the end, she and Lee were both damn grateful for it, and for the way it turned them into an unassailable team.

They'd stopped sleeping together the minute her transfer orders came down from the Old Man. It wasn't worth the risk to the chain of command, not when they both wanted someone else and were only using each other for stress relief. (Maybe if they'd been serious about each other. Maybe if they'd been in love. Maybe, in some other universe.)

In the days after they jumped away from New Caprica, though, they'd both begun to unravel. Lee was frantic with worry over Kara, and Dee was increasingly convinced that her soul mate had been left behind on New Caprica, too.

The Pegasus felt like a powder keg with no fuse and no pressure valve, poised to blow. Two weeks after their retreat, under a series of increasingly implausible circumstances Dee could never recall clearly afterward, Pegasus's Commander and her XO decided to retire unilaterally to Commander's quarters, get stupid drunk, almost-but-not-quite sleep together again, and then talk the entire mess out between them while cuddling in Lee's bed.

It took most of the night and half the next morning. They came out of it bloodshot and weary, but stronger, Dee thought, than they'd ever been--alone or together.

One night, deep in terrain maps and half-baked plans to retake New Caprica, Dee turned to Lee and said, impulsively, "Aren't you glad we never really dated? This would be a nightmare if we were a couple."

The look Lee shot her was all irritation at having his train of thought interrupted.

"What?" he asked shortly, then straightened and seemed to consider what she'd said.

"All right," he said at last. "I'll give you that. But either way, I'm damn glad to have you as my XO. And my friend."

ALGAE PLANET

205 DAYS SINCE NEW CAPRICA

So when Lee sent her down into the Valley of Almost Certain Death to rescue Kara from the Cylons, a few weeks after Starbuck and Apollo'd all but killed each other in the boxing ring, well, she knew damn well it had nothing to do with the gun she'd later hear that Anders had drawn on him. Dee didn't rage, and she didn't fuss; she went down the blind bluff and she rescued Kara Frakking Thrace because her Commander had told her to, and she could; and because she knew Lee wouldn't have sent her if he imagined for one second that she couldn't pull it off.

Of course Dee could do it. Of course Lee knew she could. They were a team. They had been forged together in their estrangement from hope after New Caprica. They knew each other's minds better than either of them knew their own.

When she landed on Galactica's flight deck and cracked the hatch open to controlled chaos, her eyes went first to Lee. He nodded his thanks; she grinned; and they both watched as Sam and Kara enacted their ridiculous emotive reunion in the middle of the crowd.

She pulled Lee aside half an hour later, after their briefing, and gave him the look that had cowed Pegasus crew members into confessing crimes many and various. "You need to work out your shit with that soul mate of yours."

Lee stared at her, confusion writ large across his face. "What?"

"You need to work out your shit with--"

"Dee," he interrupted. "I don't _have_ a soul mate."

"What do you mean you don't--are you frakking kidding--" She fumbled to rearrange her assumptions, lining up the facts anew. The picture they formed, even with this changed input, didn't substantially alter. "Fine. I don't care whether you're soul mates or not. Work out your shit with Starbuck, or I'm going to wedgie you both at an inconvenient but hilarious moment. Sir."

"She's not my soul mate," he insisted. And, "She was _Zak's_."

Gods damn. "Oh."

"And in case you've forgotten, she's _married_. To Sam."

If Dee hadn't been so distracted by the revelation about Zak, she might have pounced on the _something_ in his voice as he'd said Sam's name. Instead, she spat, "I don't give a frak. And neither do you."

Lee was about to object again, so she cut him off, poking her index finger into his sternum with each word--

"Work. Out. Your. Shit. With. Kara."

\--and bugged out the door before he had a chance to say anything else.

OUTSKIRTS OF NEW CAPRICA CITY

126 DAYS AFTER THE INAUGURATION OF PRESIDENT GAIUS BALTAR

New Caprica was a mass delusion, brought to life in mud, cold rain, and backbreaking labour. It was a doomed affair from the very beginning.

Laura knew that. Adama knew it.

But once the election was over and settling on New Caprica became unavoidable, Laura had to admit that there was a certain appeal to soil underfoot, a sky over your head; to air that hadn't been recycled and sanitized for the ten thousandth time before you breathed it in; to rainfall and wind and the thought of being, somehow, in some way, part of the cycle of life again.

The Land of Plenty it was not. It was an ugly little rock, barely able to support life, but it was what they had. It would suffice.

Still, it rankled. What good was Pythia, what good was turning herself into their prophesied frakking _humble leader_ , what good was allowing Tory to rig an election, when it had all led to this?

They were going to die on this pathetic little rock and--

But not today. Today was for celebrating being alive at all, and for breaking ground on a new settlement. And so far, at least, the day seemed to be going well.

The weather was sunny and clear, for once, and Laura made her way slowly down the dirt path between the market tables and pondered how such a meager festival as this nevertheless brought out the sparkle in New Caprica's eyes and the spring in its step.

Groundbreaking Day. The name was silly and pretentious, but also... something to hold on to. Something that belonged solely to New Caprica, in a way the old holidays never would.

It remained to be seen whether or not President Baltar's administration would continue to observe Colonial Day, or whether they would take up Groundbreaking Day in its stead and wipe Colonial Day from the calendar when it came around in a few months. If Laura had been in charge, she'd have kept both; they needed every excuse to celebrate their hard-won survival. But she was, after all, no longer the one making those calls.

She stopped in front of a stall to examine a bolt of raw cloth that some enterprising soul had woven from native New Caprican grasses. It was coarse but serviceable, with a good heavy density, and would probably work well as an outer layer to break the wind once the weather turned cool--cooler, that is. She could make a skirt or a jacket from it, show support for the crafter and the New Caprican economy, and--no, better to wait until someone came up with a way to dye it. New Caprica was drab and colourless enough without dressing to blend into the heather like a quail.

Her soul mate hummed softly in the back of her mind, sweet and vaguely melancholy, and Laura paused to listen as she stroked the rough weave. The tune was familiar but she couldn't quite place it.

Maybe Laura should think about looking through the election records to try to find her. The thought of reaching out to her soul mate now, with failure so fresh at hand, was hard to swallow. She wasn't ready. But maybe, once things fell into some sort of routine, she would be.

A scuffle further up the lane drew Laura's belated attention. Three soldiers--tall and aggressively military despite their civilian clothes--were shadowing a pair of shabbily-dressed young men, heckling the teens for-- _really_? For not having fought the Cylons? Frak's sake.

The two boys ducked their heads and kept walking, but the military types were glued to their heels. The tallest and thinnest of the soldiers leaned in and spat on the teens, one of whom whipped around to throw the first punch in a fight that was only going to end badly.

"Hey!" Laura yelled, and they all startled and turned in alarm, only to dismiss her on sight.

"What're you staring at, grandma?" the biggest of the goons asked, taking a step toward her. "This is none of your business."

Not for the first time, she regretted having traded away her presidential suits. Still, she'd managed this much: no one had hit anybody yet.

"I'm sure it isn't," she said firmly, a poor opening gambit in what was bound to be a failed attempt to talk them down--

And a very timely officer stepped around the corner.

The three goons straightened suddenly to attention, and Laura felt the weight of a problem she couldn't solve lift from her shoulders.

It was an admittedly minor problem, on the scale of the mess Laura had grown used to facing down. But the relief that rolled over her as it happened was no less profound... or surreal. Someone had shown up to take this one. When was the last time that had happened to her?

She turned to find a diminutive young woman in Colonial uniform gazing neutrally at the three soldiers. She was tiny--barely over five feet tall--and nothing about her bearing screamed authority, but--

Lieutenant Dualla. The officer was Billy's Lieutenant Dualla.

Second in command of the Pegasus, these days, if Laura's memory served.

The men saluted blankly and effortlessly.

"Lieutenant."

"Lieutenant!"

"Specialists Gage, Vireem, Shaver," Dualla said with a nod to each in turn. "I hope you've enjoyed your hour and a half on New Caprica. Because your shore leave is over."

"The frak?" the skinny one asked before being elbowed in the ribs by one of his buddies.

"Yessir," the biggest goon said deferentially as their targets slipped quietly away down the lane.

"Sir," the third man echoed.

"What the frak are you waiting for?" Dualla asked them sharply. "The next raptor back to Pegasus departs in--" she checked her watch, "--twelve minutes. You'd better move."

"Sir!"

"Yes, sir!"

They strode off in the direction of the shuttle pad and Laura finally released the breath she'd been holding.

("Who the frak does she think she is?" the tall one muttered as they moved out of sight.

"She's the godsdamn XO," his buddy told him, and that was the last Laura heard.)

Dualla frowned after their retreating backs for a moment before turning to Laura with at least half of a genuine smile. "You're all right, Madam President?"

"I'm fine, Lieutenant," Laura agreed. "Though I'm not sure about their original targets. One of the soldiers spat on those two boys."

"I'll see if I can track them down," Dualla said with a soft sigh. "Apologize to them."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me for doing my job," she said, already walking away. Then she looked back at Laura and smiled over her shoulder--a real expression this time, friendly and open. Laura found herself smiling back reflexively. "You look lovely, Madam President. Red is a good colour for you." ~~~~

GALACTICA

179 DAYS SINCE NEW CAPRICA

 _Dancing._ Whoever dubbed this _dancing_ , Dee decided, should be lined up against a bulkhead and shot.

Violence wasn't a _dance_. There was nothing beautiful about it--boxing was a parody of grace. Blooding your friends and COs, enemies and subordinates, and calling it frakking therapy. Sure, everyone on board needed to blow off some steam--but did they have to punch each other in the face to do it?

The Old Man wasn't often wrong, but he was wrong about this, and everyone participating in this spectacle were idiots. Especially the idiot Dee was here to support.

She would have retreated to her rack hours ago without a second thought, except that Lee looked far too much like he had an axe to grind, and--well, Dee knew better than anyone that the only person he wanted to whet his axe against was Kara (and maybe Sam--but it wasn't her place to go there, so she didn't. Lee could sort out _some_ of his frakking relationship melodrama for himself, gods damn it). And if she knew that much, she also knew that Lee and Kara in a boxing ring together would be--to say the least--an explosively bad idea.

Naturally, Lee lacked the common sense the gods gave a sand flea, and his ability to resist bad ideas involving Kara Thrace was about equal to that of a moth voluntarily immolating itself in a bonfire.

Because Lee was, as she'd said before, an _idiot_ , and Kara even moreso.

Gods, Dee loved the man, but she thanked her past self for having had the sense to avoid getting romantic about him. He was _deranged_.

And _dancing_. With the love of his life. No one needed to be told that Lee and Kara were soul mates--it was written on their faces, in their bearing, in the way they moved around each other, the way they both lit up anytime the other was in the room. Watching Lee and Kara dance around each other all these years had stung, when Dee's soul mate wouldn't even speak to her--and here they were battering away at each other, as if that would help them work out their communication problems.

Knowing Lee and Kara, of course, it probably would.

Because they were a matched set of perfect imbeciles.

She watched them sag against each other at last, battered and bloody and half undone, and she sighed in relief.

Maybe now they could all get on with their lives with the little less of the perpetual Starbuck-Apollo in-house theatrics.

She saw Anders moving toward the ring and got out of his way, but all Sam did was hover awkwardly for a moment before fading back to the edges of the room while Lee and Kara managed to prop each other up, covered in blood and definitely short a few brain cells apiece.

Guess they wouldn't be talking things out today.

She was turning away in annoyance when she heard her soul mate--oh, for crying out loud, was she serious--cheerfully humming the Caprican Boxing Bros tune in her inner ear.

 _Frak_ _you,_ Dee thought futilely in her soul mate's direction.

Her soul mate was in the room. In this very room! And obviously enjoying the brutal spectacle, like the ghoul she was.

In a fit of pique, Dee focused as hard as she could and fired off a series of heavy bass rumbles from some half-remembered orchestral piece she'd heard in a music hall on Caprica, two lifetimes ago.

Her soul mate immediately dropped the boxing jingle and switched to a light, upbeat piece of orchestral music.

It could be hard to tell for sure with instrumentals, where she heard less of her soul mate's own mental voice, but Dee thought the other woman sounded... exhilarated? Happy? In a way that she seldom did.

The nerve.

As frustrated as Dee was with the godsdamn boxing, with Lee and Kara, and especially with her horrible soul mate, she couldn't help but feel reluctantly charmed.

She sounded so... so breezy, so relaxed. Dee didn't know her, but she knew, down to her bones, that this was not a woman who had much opportunity to be carefree.

Dee couldn't stand to rain on her parade.

Worse, as her soul mate leapt from jingles to orchestrals to her favourite Cap-pop songs, Dee found herself captivated.

 _I don't even know you and I can't stay mad at you_ , she thought incredulously. _How is this anything resembling fair?_

GALACTICA

207 DAYS SINCE NEW CAPRICA

Nearly a month after the godsfrakked _dance_ , and two days after she nearly died bailing Starbuck out of that mess on the algae planet, Dee dragged herself reluctantly through half her usual workout--she'd wasted too much time looking for Lee before she figured out where he must be and retreated to the gym on her own--and then she made a couple of detours on her way to shower. First, to the mess for "coffee" of dubious origin. Second, to Lee's empty rack, where she sat carefully sipping the hot brew and contemplating just how long she could afford to wait before she drank his ration, too.

Lee staggered into his duty locker at 0700 sharp, looking--huh. Adorably disheveled, and more relaxed than she'd ever seen him. He met Dee's smug grin with the wide-eyed stare of a rabbit in an owl's crosshairs.

She held out the second cup of coffee.

"You're an angel," he said at last, inhaling half of it. "Sorry I ditched you this morning."

"You're forgiven. Assuming you finally got off your ass and--"

"Let's say I did, and I'll tell you everything tomorrow," he promised. "0600?"

"You'd better frakking show up this time."

"Yes _sir_!"

"And I have no idea how this happened," Lee concluded giddily, beaming at her as they jogged down a deserted corridor the next day.

"You have the gods' luck, that's for sure," she said, cringing at her own wry tone. "...I'm sorry. I promise I'm happy for you. It's just--"

"--Hard to be happy for me falling into whatever-the-frak this is with Kara and Sam, when your soul mate still has you pining and languishing."

"Shut up!" she laughed. _Languishing_. Really.

"Am I _wrong_ , though?"

"No," she admitted sourly. She picked up her pace and tried to leave him behind at a blind corner. "Not even a little."

He matched her speed easily. "Whoever she is, she doesn't deserve you."

"Frak that," she muttered, slowing down again. "Can I borrow a piece of Anders if I get really lonely? He looks like he'd be fun to climb."

"Nope." And there he was, grinning again. "Mine."

"And now you've gone greedy on me. Kara's really rubbing off on you."

" _Yeah_ , she is."

"I _do not_ want to hear about your sex life, thank you very--"

"You asked!"


	3. Chapter 3

GALACTICA

TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Dee had to admit that the 'religious wingnut' critique of Roslin was persuasive, even if it was coming out of Baltar's camp.

Baltar would make a terrible President, anyone with common sense could see that--but Roslin wouldn't be her first choice, either. Dee would really have to hold her nose to vote for someone who had cozied up to the extremist religious factions the way Roslin had done--was still doing, for goodness' sake. _Humble leader?_ Whether she'd tied herself to Pythia's ramblings out of sincere belief in her own gods-ordained right to lead, or had decided the moral compromise was worth it for political gain, it smacked of everything Dee despised from back home.

For all her flaws, though, Roslin at least had her feet on the ground. Billy would have said--well, it didn't really matter _what_ Billy would have said if he'd lived, and Dee wasn't about to cast her vote based on Billy's loyalty to his damn boss. Still, Roslin was a realist and knew how to run a government. Baltar, on the other hand, was all hot air and sleazy promises.

No, Baltar could not be allowed to win the Presidency.

So when Foster approached Dee and asked if she'd be willing to do more to help than simply coordinate ballot transfers... and then asked her a series of leading questions that skewed carefully toward engineering the results of an election...

Well, for Dee it had been simple. Ethics didn't much matter if you were dead on a barren planet in the middle of nowhere.

Whether or not President Roslin was the _humble leader_ Pythia had foreseen, she was the only possible leader on the ballot, and she could not be allowed to lose.

Dee caught herself humming the hymn for good fortune as she dressed. And why not? They'd need it today--maybe Roslin would win legitimately, and none of their preparations would be necessary. Or maybe they'd have to step in to ensure a viable outcome, and they'd need luck to pull that off, too.

She was leaving her duty locker when she realized belatedly that her soul mate wasn't humming back.

She almost tripped out the hatch and then froze. Her soul mate couldn't be--she couldn't be gone. She couldn't be dead?

No, something inside her rejected the thought. Dee would have known. She'd have felt it--and right now she could almost feel her soul mate leaning in, silence echoing inside Dee's skull like the aftershock of a bass drum's low boom.

Was her soul mate offended by--impossible. She couldn't know _who_ Dee supported.

Was she one of the loud-but-wrong types who refused to vote because they found both candidates and the entire political system distasteful? No way. This was Dee's soul mate, after all. She couldn't be that awful.

No, something else was at work here. Maybe her soul mate was feeling the same impending sense of doom Lee had mentioned the last time she'd seen him. Maybe she was scared of the future.

Maybe good luck seemed out of reach to her.

No sense in overthinking it, Dee decided. With or without luck, the election would be over in a few hours.

CAPRICA CITY

20 YEARS BEFORE THE DESTRUCTION OF THE COLONIES

Laura had tried dating women, and decided it didn't work for her.

Not for lack of fireworks. No, she was as attracted to a beautiful woman as she was to anyone else--which was to say, she was drawn to _interesting_ people, to people who were strong and fierce and smart. People who stuck their necks out when they didn't have to. People who stood for something.

She knew how to flirt, how to score dates. Most of all, by the time she was out on her own in the world, Laura knew how to put on the _performance_ of a good date, how to breathe wit and captivation, and then take it all off at the end of the night--or the next morning, if that was how the stars should happen to align. Dating was a game, and Laura always won.

But when those dates were with a woman... well.

Something always fell apart, sooner or later. She'd go home on her own at the end of the night and curl up under a blanket, trying to ease the terrible pressure inside her head, the desperate ache of... sadness? Longing? Disappointment, certainly. As if she was searching for something that wasn't there to be found--something that might or might not ever be real.

It was easier to date not-women, and easiest to date men. With men, she could convince herself that all anyone wanted was a good time--and she could convince _them_ that she was a good time ( _let's keep things simple, why worry about the future, I'm not looking for commitment, let's just enjoy tonight_ ).

She didn't mean to be such an appalling mess. Maybe she'd been broken by her mother's illness. Maybe she wasn't evolved enough for functional relationships. (Shut up, Cheryl, it's absolutely a possibility.)

Mostly, she tried not to overthink it. What did it matter, anyway? She had a soul mate.

GALACTICA

ONE MONTH SINCE THE ALGAE PLANET

"Well," Laura said, and smiled despite herself. "It's been a while since Captain Apollo graced Colonial One with his presence."

Lee grinned at her across the table. "It has."

"This was a good idea." In point of fact, it had been her idea. After their near-disastrous rendezvous with the Cylons at the Eye of Jupiter, it had made sense to strengthen old ties and reestablish friendships that had gone untended too long.

Lee wasn't her military advisor--hadn't been her advisor for a lot longer than he'd ever held the ad hoc position in the first place, and had long since been promoted past _Captain_ \--but there was no reason she couldn't make use of his perspective and his insight into the fleet's situation. Or, she admitted to herself and _only_ herself, how downright pleasant he was as company.

"I haven't even made a clever suggestion, yet," he teased.

"Then let's give you the opportunity. The Captain of the--"

She froze. Something was wrong. Something--

She felt as if her inner ear was wobbling, as though her core were being shaken upside down by a vigorous hand.

Suddenly queasy, she grabbed for the table in front of her. "Lee--"

"What's wrong?"

"I don't... know," she said slowly as she recovered her bearings. She breathed in, held it for a few seconds, then exhaled as her balance wobbled again. "But something's. Hmm."

She strained to listen, trying to catch whatever it was that she could sense on the very edge of her hearing--to no avail.

"Madam President--"

"I can almost hear it--" And then she realized. Shit frak _damn frakking godsdamn it_. She couldn't hear anything except the pulsing, quivering absence of sound. Something was _wrong_. Inside, where her other half lived. "I need to find my soul mate."

"What?" Lee stared at her in confusion.

"My soul mate. Something's wrong. I need to get to her. _Now_."

"Who?"

She shook her head mutely.

"You don't--?" he began, then caught himself. "After all these years, you still don't know who she is."

"No," Laura agreed. "Can you help me find her?"

He shook his head in dismay. "I wouldn't have the first clue where to start, but I'll do what I can. Do you know anything? Who she is, where she is...?"

"She's alive--for now--and she's in the fleet." Still not something to undervalue. What else, what else? "She's Sagittaron, female, soprano, cool as a cucumber--"

Lee visibly boggled.

"--younger than me, hates boxing, likes Caprican pop--"

" _Dee?_ "

What. "Dee?"

"My friend--my former XO. Lieutenant Dualla. You've just described her."

"I've met Dee. Isn't she about twelve years old?"

"Oh my gods," Lee said, burying his face in his hands. "Oh my _gods_."

"What?" Laura asked. "Really?"

"I'm sorry. But _oh my gods_."

"Seriously?" Laura asked again. "Dee?"

"She's everything you just listed. And _not_ twelve." He shook his head in dismay. "And it makes a weird sort of sense."

As intriguing as that statement might be, she didn't have time to engage with Lee's concepts of _weird_ or _sense_ when _something was terribly wrong_. "Where is Dee now, Major?"

Dee was drifting and the world around her kept passing in and out of focus:

She was a nebula, lost among the stars.

(She could hear the faintest traces of music, of her soul mate humming, something melodious and calm.)

She was in Dogsville, feverish and hazy, grasping futilely for Doctor Robert's arm as he stepped away from the exam table.

She was the Blackbird, trailing Galactica, invisibly bound to her mothership by loyalty and love.

(She heard her soul mate reaching out, thrumming with tension, a tangled descant as she strained for her--)

She was Caprica City, burning as Cylon nukes fell from the sky--

She was a viper, tiny and fragile, burning up, falling into the sun--

She came to in her own body, lying parched on a hospital bed, panting for air. She was burning, like Caprica under the bombs, and then she started shivering, and that was worse. She needed water. She needed--

She was rescuing Starbuck from the Cylons, tumbling down scrub-covered hills, watching as Fischer died at her side again and again.

She was a star, dying in fire and rage, alone in the blackness of space.

(Someone was looking for her. Someone was--she was--)

Her joints hurt. Her head ached.

Oh. Helo was there.

Dee was being moved, and that was good. Helo would make sure she was safe, even if she never got found. Helo had her and it was going to be okay.

Even if she never got found by the voice inside her head.

Lieutenant Dualla was going to be fine, had been treated for Mellorak disease and was already asleep in a bed in Galactica's sickbay by the time Lee was able to track down her whereabouts. Laura received the news from Lee and finally felt as if she could breathe again.

Until she remembered that Lee was now the only witness to her most dangerous secret--the mystery she hadn't allowed herself to pursue in case it distracted her from what she needed to do. Who she needed to be.

Not that she had much of a choice about that, any more.

"I have to tell her," Lee said, sitting at Dualla's bedside next to Laura. "I'm sure you had a good reason for avoiding her all this time, but Dee... she's my best friend. We've seen each other through everything. I can't keep something like this from her."

"I understand." Laura nodded. She was reminded, appallingly, of the look on Lee's face as he told her and Adama that he'd made a deal with a terrorist and committed her to a Presidential election without consulting her on the subject _because it was the right thing to do_.

Damn Lee Adama for serving as her conscience, anyway.

"Maybe it's time," she admitted, her eyes on Dualla's slight figure under the hospital sheet, "for me to stop being a coward."

"You are many things, Madam President, but a coward isn't one of them."

She shot him a skeptical look but didn't reply, and he took his leave with a brief nod to her and a final glance at Dualla's slumbering form.

Thus her vigil at her soul mate's bedside began.

It was surreal, being here after so many years of wordless communication; stranger that it came after Dualla had almost died, and Laura had somehow known. Strangest of all, of course, that Galactica's sickbay was where Laura and Dualla had first spoken, over Billy's dead body.

Billy, who had loved Dee so much, and who had proposed to her the day before he died. Billy, who had been like a son to Laura.

And Lieutenant Dualla, Billy's Dee, was her soul mate. It was too much to absorb. It was too much to believe.

Gods.

And today could have ended with Dee's corpse on the same silent bier.

It didn't bear thinking about, but Laura couldn't stop the runaway train of her thoughts for long enough to catch her breath.

Out of habit, she started to hum one of the old Sagittaron chants, a prayer for peace. It was long, elaborate, and soothing, just as the name inferred, and she was halfway through the twelfth repetition of the chorus when she became aware of another voice meandering silently alongside hers: a clear, delicate soprano shivering inside Laura's head, the voice of the woman who lay mere inches away, her eyes still closed but aware enough to respond to Laura's mental hum.

Laura fell silent, her song crumbling into shocked echoes, and Dualla carried the hymn on her own for a moment longer before she, too, came to a tremulous stop.

On the bed in front of Laura, Dualla opened her eyes.

CAPRICA

30 YEARS BEFORE CYLON ATTACK ON THE COLONIES

Laura was fifteen years old when she first started hearing whispers in the back of her mind--glimmers of sound, trembling cascades of notes, strange and soft and like no music she'd ever heard before.

Everyone said that soul bonds could take a while to settle and that you might not hear much for months or even years after they started to form, so she didn't worry. Fifteen was a pretty typical age for it to start, and plenty of her friends had begun hearing sounds, or _saying_ they did--only 64% of the population ever heard the music in their soul mate's head, according to the latest Caprican census, but plenty more lied to friends and family about it. No one wanted to be alone or, even worse, _admit_ that they were alone inside their own heads.

Laura wasn't alone, though, and never would be again.

By the time she started getting coherent melodies, she was eighteen and about to start college--and she was being driven half-crazy by how much she couldn't make heads or tails of what she was hearing. Nothing about the music in her head was familiar, not the language or the cadence or the key. She didn't like mysteries that she couldn't solve, and it left her frustrated.

So she had a soul mate--big deal. They might never meet. Or they might meet too late for it to matter. They might meet and hate each other. Or--who knew?

She moved into a college dorm and started her bachelor's in history and tried not to think about it, the same way she tried not to think about the Cylon War.

By her second year of university, it was obvious that whatever she was hearing from her soul mate was nothing like Caprican music--and nothing like the bits she knew of Picon opera or the classical Virgon symphonies, either. Wherever her soul mate was, it was somewhere a long way from here.

In third year, she leveraged a couple of comparative sociology credits and all the charm she could muster to get signed into a senior-level multicultural music course for which she lacked every prerequisite. She was in over her head at first, lost in jargon about foreign scales and unfamiliar instruments. She crammed as much listening time as she could into the corners of a full course load, trying to make any of the audio files sound like the music she'd been hearing inside her head--and then one night she reached the extra credit modules and suddenly, suddenly, there it was. She _knew_ this song. She knew that verse. What the frak _was_ it?

 _Sagittaron children's counting song_ , read the track list.

She jumped to the next audio, _Sagittaron prayer to Athena and Demeter_ and--

"Oh holy shit," Laura muttered aloud. She knew that one, too.

She kept jumping forward on the disk, sampling everything from Sagittaron and finding a host of old familiar friends.

_Sagittaron children's skipping chant_

_Sagittaron mourning hymn_

_East Sagittaron Sabbath prayer_

_Sagittaron children's bedtime song #3_ (#1 and #2 were unfamiliar, but #3 was the quiet melody she'd been hearing for _literal years_.)

Mystery solved, then. Her soul mate was on Sagittaron.

GALACTICA SICKBAY

FIVE HOURS SINCE DEE WAS RETRIEVED FROM DOGSVILLE

"Madam President?" Dualla asked, blinking up at her from the bed. "What are you doing here?"

Laura was caught speechless. She'd thought she had more time. She'd thought--

Dualla cleared her throat, taking in the empty sickbay around them. "I'm sorry, that was rude of me, and I'm about to be rude again, but--why are you here?"

"I heard that you were sick," Laura managed, then wanted to slap herself for the ambiguity of her words. "Not heard, but _heard_. Inside my head. I knew something was wrong."

Dualla's eyes were wide and dazed and brilliantly green. "I think I must have misunderstood you," she said at last, sitting up in the bed.

"No, you haven't misunderstood." Laura breathed in, slowly, trying to find the words. "I've let you down for a long time, but I couldn't let you die."

"You never answered any of my messages on the boards," Dualla said after a minute.

"You posted to the--?" Laura shook her head. "I didn't know. I never looked."

"Why not?"

"A number of sensible reasons that boiled down to, oh, a complete inability to be good for anyone. I'm not someone you would want to know." Laura swallowed and tried to figure out how to explain to a stranger what was so easy for her to rationalize in her own thoughts. "I'm not good at being close to people. I don't have much to offer. And what little I did have was desperately needed elsewhere--our survival had to come first."

She met Dualla's eyes and felt small in the face of her skepticism.

"And after that," she concluded, "I didn't think I had anything left to offer you."

"You've changed your mind about that?" Dualla asked calmly, neutrally, as if she already knew Laura's answer.

"No," Laura said. Dualla deserved the truth. "Not entirely."

Dualla waited her out, letting the tension unspool until Laura had to break it. She was impressed. She was always impressed--when was the last time she'd crossed paths with Dualla and _not_ been amazed at her strength and resilience?

"I am--" Laura tried again. "I have given my all, my everything, to safeguard humanity. I had to-- _I have to_ \--ensure a future. I don't know if there's enough of me to do that and also have anything left for myself or you. And I think you deserve better than that degree of half-assed inadequacy from your soul mate."

Laura shivered at the words-- _soul mate_ , oh gods, it was like flaying herself open for a critical audience of one--but Dualla only sat in the hospital bed and continued to gaze at her, impassive.

"Maybe," Dualla said, "you should have let me decide what I was comfortable accepting, instead of telling me what I deserve."

"Maybe I should have. Maybe that's why I'm here."

"It sounds like you're here because you didn't want me until you'd almost lost me."

"No." Laura shook her head.

"That's not exactly flattering, Madam President. No matter who you are."

"No matter--" Laura smothered an ironic laugh. "Gods. Don't talk like I'm a prize, because I'm not."

"You're the only prize I ever wanted," Dualla said softly, laying down again and turning onto her side. With her face toward the wall and her back to Laura, she looked smaller than ever, the curve of her spine so terribly fragile. "But I don't want you on sufferance. Please go away and let me sleep now."

If Laura had been uncomfortable before, knowing her soul mate was alive but never seeking her out, how much worse was it to have found her and have already frakked it up? It was everything Laura had been afraid of, and she'd brought it on herself by keeping her distance for so long.

She had hurt Dualla, even if she hadn't meant to, even if it had self-centeredly never occurred to her that her restraint might harm her soul mate; and now they were both hurting and _there was no reason for it,_ none at all, when all she wanted was to wrap Dualla in her arms and never let her go.

Because Laura wanted her so desperately. She hadn't let herself think about it over the years, hadn't allowed herself to see how deeply she relied on there being _someone_ _out there_ to pull her through. But having realized that Lieutenant Dualla was her soul mate, was supposed to be hers--gods, how she wanted her.

But Dualla wasn't _someone_ , some unknown scooped from the fleet; she had been Billy's girlfriend, and was Lee Adama's best friend, and there were more than enough sedimentary layers of damage and pain between them even without Laura's own missteps.

Maybe they were already past some sort of breaking point.

Maybe they were better off apart, in the end.

GALACTICA

THREE YEARS BEFORE THE CYLON ATTACK

There was a moment early in her posting to Galactica when Dee had considered Felix Gaeta a friend--or someone who might one day become a friend. Truth be told, there was a moment when she'd considered sleeping with him, though she would look back on that possibility with embarrassment later.

Gods, she had been so young--all right, so she'd been thirty, but she'd _felt_ young--and so desperate for approval. For someone to tell her that she was fine just the way she was.

Gaeta had been a peer. He'd been friendly and supportive on her first day in the CIC, if sometimes more than a little inadvertently patronizing, and she'd liked the way he tried so hard to reach out to the people around him. She liked that he cared enough about Galactica and its crew to want other people to succeed at their jobs, too.

One night, over dinner when they happened to run into each other in the mess, she told him about the music. He laughed at her.

She sat there, stunned. He'd _laughed_.

"You can't be serious," he said, oblivious to her reaction. "You don't have a soul mate! You're fooling yourself. It's all wishful thinking, anyway."

"Excuse me?"

"Soul mates are bullshit. You'd know better if you'd read the latest from--"

She tuned out the rest.

 _Wishful thinking_. He thought her soul mate was a case of _wishful thinking_?

She picked up her fork and took another bite of her meatloaf with more aggression than it warranted.

Gods bless anyone who thought they could come between Dee and her soul mate. Gaeta was wrong, and he'd eat his words someday.

GALACTICA SICKBAY

TWO DAYS SINCE MELLORAK OUTBREAK WAS CONTAINED IN DOGSVILLE

It had hurt before, to be so separate from her soul mate, but now it was a gaping hole in Dee's chest--and she had put it there herself. She'd sent President Roslin away.

What had she been _thinking_?

She'd been feverish. That was the only explanation.

She'd been delirious, and she'd been angry--hurt after all the years of avoidance, all the years in which she wondered why her soul mate didn't want her. And now to find out that her soul mate was someone as utterly baffling as the _President_ , imperious and commanding and, and, breathtaking?

But Roslin didn't want to give any of herself to Dee, had only been there at Dee's bedside because she got scared when she thought Dee was dying--

 _That isn't what she said_ , Dee reminded herself reasonably, but it didn't matter.

It didn't. Roslin hadn't wanted Dee enough to come find her sooner, and she still didn't. Not really.

"What are you doing here?" Lee asked in surprise when he walked into the gym at oh-dark-hundred the next morning.

"Where else would I be?"

He gave Dee what could only be described as _a look_. "In bed. With your frakking soul mate."

"She doesn't want me," Dee said, turning away to grab--something, she needed something in her hands and to _not_ be seeing the expression on Lee's face.

"Or in bed resting. You had Mellorak, for goodness' sake."

"The Doc fixed me up," she said, still looking elsewhere. "Said I had a mild case."

"Dee," he said, one hand on her shoulder and the other brushing a wisp of hair off her forehead. "Dee. Look at me."

She met his eyes mutely.

"You and I know each other well, really well. But I know Laura Roslin probably better than anyone alive can claim to. And I wish you could have seen her face, when she thought you were in danger, when she realized her soul mate was you--that wasn't the face of someone who doesn't care, or doesn't want you."

"Frak," Dee managed, stung. "It doesn't matter anyway. I told her to leave me alone."

"You what?" Lee started laughing. "Gods, and I thought me and Kara were frakked up. You and the President take the cake."

"Shut up!" But she was laughing now, too, and maybe it wasn't going to be the end of the worlds after all. "Shut up, Lee, damn it--shut up and help me fix this."

He shot her a look full of mischief and affection. "Of course I will."

GALACTICA

ONE WEEK AFTER CONTAINMENT OF MELLORAK OUTBREAK

Dee had been hearing the same song in her head for the past half-hour and it was _frakking her up_. She'd been about to begin a routine diagnostic on Galactica's FTL computer when the syncopated beat of classic Cap-pop started an apparently infinite loop in Roslin's mind. All Dee had to do was manually calculate a set of random trajectories and match them against what the computer was spitting out, but the math was completely out of reach when she had _President Roslin_ and her cheerful humming of dead pop starlets' greatest hits on endless repeat in her brain.

The _nerve_. After the conversation they'd had in sickbay, couldn't she at least keep it down over there?

Frak it. Dee would have to revisit this later, in her off duty hours, when she could hear herself think. She packed up her tools and the log books and headed down to break for lunch.

Because it wasn't loud and annoying enough in her head already, the mess hall was abuzz with whispers: three marines had been booted out of the gym in the middle of their workouts and the room had been locked down, by order of the Admiral. Naturally, because the military was nothing if not a steaming cesspit of gossip, speculation on the subject was out of control. No one had heard an alarm or seen repair crews near the gym, so what the frak was going on in there?

The song in Dee's head went up another fraction of a decibel and she was ready to snap at everyone, especially the two loudly gossiping about--

Gods all damn it.

Dumping her half-eaten food on the free rations table, she paced furiously to the gym and--

Stood outside the door, waiting for Roslin to emerge.

Ten minutes into the wait, she realized how ridiculous a move this was. Even if she was right and Roslin stepped through that hatch, what was she going to say to her?

She had no idea. If all she wanted was for Roslin to stop, she could have communicated that by blasting a different piece of music back at her. What was she even _doing_ here?

Fifteen minutes in, she almost walked away--but she got only as far as the next hallway juncture, Laura frakking Roslin still humming in her head, and turned back.

The marines at the hatch gave her another wary look but didn't deter her from standing across the hall, arms crossed over her chest.

After twenty minutes, she quit holding up the bulkhead and started pacing.

She should leave. She should go back and finish her lunch. This was absurd.

Twenty-two minutes in, the hatch to the gym opened and President Roslin emerged, sweaty and disheveled, dressed in a set of military tanks and oversized gym shorts. What the _hells_.

She took one look at Dee and froze, the music in both their heads cutting off to startled silence.

Dee hadn't known what she was going to say, but it tumbled out of her mouth unbidden. "I can't work like this. You have to stop."

"Stop what?"

"Stop. Frakking. Humming."

"Shit," the President said, her impeccable veneer cracking and something softer shining through, even as the inside of Dee's mind crackled with silent tension. Frak, Roslin was beautiful, clammy skin and flyaways and all. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to distract you. I was working out."

Softening in response, Dee informed her, "You've had Lady Gaia's _Material Girl_ in your head for a godsdamn hour."

"Whoops."

The marines were exchanging looks with each other, and Dee knew gossip about her and Roslin would be all over the ship in an hour--if it wasn't already, after sickbay. Nothing for it but to ignore the marines and carry on.

"Don't you have a uZoom or something?"

Roslin grimaced in chagrin. "Didn't exactly bring my music library with me to Galactica's retirement."

"Right," Dee muttered. "Okay. Next time you're working out, come borrow mine. At least that way I'll get a playlist in my head and not one song on repeat."

"Yes, of course." Roslin paused for a heartbeat, and then she was reaching for Dee's... hand? Dee took a step back and didn't let her make contact. Then a second step, and a few more. She needed room. She needed--

"Come on," she said.

Roslin followed her and they retreated down the hall, far enough that the guards would have to work to overhear them.

"I am sorry," the President said.

"Forget it. It's just a stupid song."

"Not the song. I'm sorry I wasn't--I'm sorry I didn't try to find you sooner. I was trying to protect myself--and protect you--but I should have considered what you wanted."

"You should have," Dee agreed, feeling her resistance crumble as easily as it had the last time she'd been irritated with her soul mate--with Roslin--during the gods damn spectacle of the _dance_. She heaved a sigh. "But it's been a shitty couple of years, for everyone, really, and I don't see why we should make this harder for each other."

The President seemed nonplussed. "What does that mean?"

"It means I don't want to spend the next two years being angry at you for the last two. We can do better than this."


	4. Chapter 4

GALACTICA GYM

ONE WEEK AFTER CONTAINMENT OF MELLORAK OUTBREAK IN DOGSVILLE

"We can do better than this."

Lieutenant Dualla might not have intended her words as a thrown gauntlet, but Laura certainly heard them as one. Was she going to pick that gauntlet up?

 _Was_ she.

"I certainly think so," Laura agreed. "What did you have in mind?"

"I don't know," Dualla said, unmoved. "You're the President. You tell me how this is supposed to work."

"Dee," she said, deliberately daring. "It can be very simple. Do you want to be with me, or not?"

"It's not like--" Dualla cut herself off and frowned. "Of course I do. I've thought about nothing but you since I woke up in sickbay."

Laura could feel the wicked smile trying to creep across her face. "Really?"

"Really. You're--you're staggering. I don't even know how to process this."

"Hmm." Laura tilted her head to the side as she considered that. "Is staggering a good thing, or a bad thing?"

Dualla laughed softly. "I have no idea."

And then she looked up at Laura, her expression open, smiling with just the corners of her eloquent eyes, and Laura found herself at a loss for words.

Her soul mate was so very, incredibly, pretty.

"I'm going to kiss you," Dualla said, while Laura was still floundering, "and then I'm going to walk away to give us both some time to think. Is that all right with you?"

"Yes," Laura had enough sense to answer. "Of course it is."

Dualla took a step closer, bringing up a hand to cup Laura's cheek; and then she tilted up onto her toes to press a kiss, firm and sweet, to Laura's lips.

As first kisses went... well. Their noses bumped, and Laura had to duck to meet Dualla, and it had been a long time since she'd been this close to anyone at all. But Dualla smelled amazing, and she fit in Laura's arms like she'd always been there--and suddenly the kiss was roaring through her blood, fresh like summer rain, hot like a sparking cable. She wanted to give Dualla everything; wanted to hold on to her for good, for real.

Something rose in her chest, a feeling of warmth, golden and soft, and she felt Dualla smile against her lips.

"So that's what destiny feels like, huh?" Dualla mused as she stepped back.

Laura was too rattled to think before she spoke. "I don't know if I believe in destiny."

"Ha!" Dualla exclaimed, taking another step away, cocky and fierce in stunning contrast to the sweetness of her kiss. "Then all of that talk about _humble leaders_ was a lie?"

"Never," Laura vowed.

Dualla shot her a skeptical look that dared her to explain away the contradiction.

"I believe--" Laura said, the words unwieldy for all that she wanted to share them. The golden hum in the back of her mind was already beginning to fade; she sighed internally at its loss, and felt more than heard the soft shiver of a distracted sigh in return.

Dualla was staring at her expectantly, impatiently, and she _couldn't_ have made that tender huff of sound. Laura must have imagined it.

She tried again. "I believe that I _am_ the humble leader written of by Pythia."

Dualla was... unmoved.

"I believe I was meant to be here, and to help humanity find a new home--to find Earth. But that doesn't mean it's certain. Destiny is a stream, a path with many forks, many possible turnings. We all make choices. Nothing is fixed for us ahead of time--the game isn't rigged."

"But you believe _all of this has happened before_."

"And will happen again. But that doesn't make it static. It doesn't happen the same way every time. We all make choices."

"You're a strange sort of prophet, Madam President."

"Not a prophet," Laura demurred. "I've had a lot of time to think about it, and I suspect I'm nothing more than a pawn, to the gods. But I want us to survive. I want it more than I need my next breath. I can't let humanity die like this, lost between the stars."

Dualla stared at her with those piercing eyes and Laura wondered what she saw, wondered what she was thinking.

"I'm beginning to understand," Dualla said at last, drawing away, "why you took so long to come find me. You believe in your own godsdamn myth. You think you, and you alone, have to save everyone. And I can't tell whether that's admirable or completely crazy."

"I've been called worse," Laura mused.

Dualla chuckled, even as she turned to walk away.

"Hey." Not quite sure what she was doing, Laura snagged Dualla by the wrist and tugged until she turned to face Laura again. "I don't need time to think. Please don't walk away."

Dualla met her eyes with studied neutrality and Laura felt an exasperated sigh shiver down their bond like a struck gong in an acoustic hall. She released Dualla's wrist and the reverb inside her skull dissipated immediately.

"That was--"

"Whoa." Dualla took a step back, blinking in dismay.

"What was that?"

"I don't--I didn't know it could do that. Did you know it could do that?"

"No!" Laura almost laughed at the affronted look on Dualla's face. "Goodness, no."

"Right." Dualla shook her head as if to dispel the haunted echo of that feeling. "But I was going to say, I've got a systems check to finish in the CIC."

"Of course--you have your duties."

"And," Dualla confessed, "I'm still angry at you."

Laura suppressed a flinch. "I see."

"I should go." She reached out and touched Laura's hand, briefly, uncertainly. Something hummed, for a second, under Laura's skin. A beat of dissonance that resolved into subtle harmony. "But you should come back. And you can borrow my uZoom when you do."

Laura did laugh, this time, at the absurdity of this conversation, of their situation--really, everything about this was ridiculous.

"All right," she told Dualla. "If that's what you want. I'll be back."

Dualla smiled up at her. "Good."

CAPRICA

23 YEARS BEFORE THE ATTACK

So Laura's soul mate was on Sagittaron, if the music in her head meant anything at all.

At the very least, her soul mate's family came from Sagittaron. And she was a decade younger than Laura, still humming counting rhymes when Laura had been graduating from high school--which was an obstacle now, while Laura was twenty-two and in college, but wouldn't be forever.

Sagittaron was the bigger problem.

In her final semesters of her bachelor's, Laura fell down a research rabbit hole, trying to learn everything she could about the colony and its music.

Her school's music department turned out to have a massive database of recordings from every one of the Twelve Colonies, but the Sagittaron files contained nothing but religious music and traditional children's rhymes. She could only stand to listen to so many hymns and skipping songs before she started digging up resources on the distant colony's visual art and culture instead.

She needed to know more. She needed to know _everything_.

She learned that Saggitaron was resource-poor, and scarcity had driven its people to prize faith, family, and fierce isolationism. They distrusted the scientific and technological advancements of the wealthier colonies which had for centuries been denied them, and had resurrected ancient scriptures and forgotten languages in their search for a higher truth.

Although there was a growing movement on Sagittaron toward more secular art and music, the only creative works that had made it off-planet, historically, had been dedicated to the gods. Sagittaron boasted more religious enclaves and spiritual denominations per capita than any other colony, and tradition discouraged the pursuit of any art, literature, or music that wasn't of a religious bent.

Laura thought she would shrivel up and die if she had to live like that. What would her soul mate be like, what could she possibly know about life, if she'd come from such a place?

With the emphasis on religion and the rejection of science and medicine, though, came increasing demand for spiritual healers and mystics--men and women who filled the role of doctors and pharmacists in the communities they served. And unlike secular music, Laura found, healing work was one thing that _had_ been exported to other colonies: Sagittaron faith healers were easy to find on Caprica, the net spitting out dozens of results to her first few queries. Some of them had to be con artists, but surely a few were legit?

After months of research and of zealously hoarding her tips, Laura psyched herself up and booked an appointment with a famous Sagittaron faith healer who lived in Delphi.

Cassandra Illeana Orion was a Sagittaron woman who had moved to Caprica City after the death of her spouses to be closer to her adult children--three of whom had married Capricans and emigrated. She had been a member of the East Sagittaron Temple of Athena for most of her life, and had attained the closest status to the priesthood that a woman could achieve in East Sagittaron: Oracle. But a Sagittaron oracle wasn't the same as a Caprican oracle, Laura gathered, though she wasn't really clear on the differences until she walked into the office she'd been directed to by _Dama_ Orion's polite answering service.

At a glance, the empty waiting room closely resembled the entry to any small doctor's office or massage clinic: soothing pastel hues, plush armchairs, a couple of innocuous magazines on an end table. The mild scent of hibiscus and maybe citrus fragranced the air, and a painting on the wall depicted women dancing, naked, in a circle under the moon.

 _Not_ what Laura had been expecting of Caprica's foremost exile from a repressive religious regime.

There didn't appear to be a receptionist, or even a desk for one, so Laura sat cautiously in one of the cushy chairs and prepared for an indeterminate wait.

Two minutes later, the door to the inner office opened.

"Miss Roslin?"

"Yes, that's me."

"Come in, dear." A matronly woman waved Laura through the door and gestured to a soft green couch set at an angle across from an antique hardwood desk. "Have a seat. I'm Cassandra."

"Thank you." She sat. "I'm here because my soul mate..."

"Your soul mate?" The oracle prompted. She was a pale woman with round cheeks and a ready smile, and reminded Laura of nothing so much as her own grandmother, who had passed in her sleep two summers ago.

"My soul mate is Sagittaron," she admitted. "So I want to know everything there is to know about Sagittaron."

Cassandra laughed. "That's a lot to know. I wouldn't claim to know everything about Sagittaron, and I lived in East Sag for most of my life."

Laura blushed. "I just mean--"

"Yes, I know. Very laudable." She blinked and Laura thought for a moment that the healer's eyes had changed--her dark irises fading milky white, the pupils glowing like amber. She blinked again, and her eyes were their ordinary brown.

It had been a trick of the light, Laura told herself. Don't be silly.

Cassandra was still speaking. "You want to know about your soul mate's life and culture, and that's a good thought. But what about you?"

"What about me?"

"Yes. What about who you are, and who you're going to become?"

"This isn't about me."

"I think it is, dear."

"Why?" she asked abruptly, immediately embarrassed at her sharp tone. "Why should it be about me?"

"It's about you because you're the one sitting in my office, asking the question," the oracle said, meeting Laura's eyes with uncomfortable directness. "And because I see in you not a _dying_ leader, but a _humble_ one."

A chill plunged down Laura's spine.

"Frak it," Laura said, rising from her seat. "This was a bad idea. I'm going to go."

"Please don't," Cassandra said. "I _can_ help you."

"Help me with what, exactly?"

"Whatever you need." The old woman shrugged. "You're already here. You paid in advance. Take advantage of my expertise."

She _had_ already paid, and she still wanted to know about Sagittaron spiritual beliefs. What did she stand to lose by staying, except her temper?

Easing back down into the couch cushions, Laura sighed. "Fine."

"You want to know about Sagittaron? I can answer your questions about Sagittaron."

And the oracle did, in detail, with the patience of a teacher and the passion of a true storyteller. She explained the meaning of the rites and rituals that Laura had only heard in the echoes of her own thoughts. She talked about the land and its people, brought to life the cities of East Sag as well as the rolling countryside, the altars, the festivals and high holidays. Laura wrote steadily, wrote until her wrist ached, reams of notes which would become the start of her binders of Sagittaron research--one of the few personal possessions she would, twenty-odd years later, regret losing in the exodus from the Colonies.

Cassandra talked for what felt like hours, answering all of Laura's questions and then answering the new ones those answers inspired.

And when she said to Laura, "There's one more thing I can help you with today, if you'll allow me?" and reached for Laura's hand, it didn't feel like an intrusion any more, but the offering of a trusted friend who had only her good at heart.

"All right," Laura said with careful grace, and extended her hand to the seer.

Cassandra took Laura's hand, closed her eyes, and went suddenly, preternaturally still.

What. The frak.

After a long, breathless series of moments in which Laura argued with herself about the merits of calling for help or withdrawing her hand from the seer's and bolting out the door _right the frak now_ , Cassandra opened her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath.

"Well. There's intergenerational trauma here that's likely to cause you some problems later," she said gently, still holding Laura's hand. "Not for another decade or three, but it won't be pleasant. I can clear it, but you'd have to be willing to let me."

All of which sounded like nonsense... but somehow, sitting there in Cassandra's pastel-painted office, it felt like a real, looming threat. "What does that mean?"

"If I release it from your energy body, it's going to change things in your life. For the better, probably."

Laura shook her head. "But what does _intergenerational trauma_ mean?"

"Most of us carry trauma in our bodies, in our genes, that isn't ours--trauma that was passed down from our ancestors. Pain from events that happened so long ago that no one alive remembers them--but your _body_ remembers. And because it remembers, you'll make self-sabotaging choices, or you'll develop the same disease that your mother or your great-grandmother did. _Intergenerational_."

"And that's bad."

"It's not good or bad, dearest. It just is. But being unwell is never pleasant. Life can be easier and more satisfying than lugging around someone else's baggage."

"I don't know," Laura said. "It sounds--"

It sounded _crazy_. It also sounded eminently reasonable. She wondered if she was being taken in after all by an especially gifted charlatan or if there might be some truth to what Cassandra was saying.

"All of this," Cassandra said, "has happened before. And will happen again."

"You're saying that I have my great-great-grandparents' PTSD? And you can get rid of it?"

"I can start the process to release it. There are no guarantees in this life, or any other."

No guarantees, Laura thought. And nothing to lose, either, if it _was_ a scam. Right? She wasn't asking for more money to treat her.

And, after all, this was the healing practice of her soul mate's home colony. Might as well find out what it was about.

"Do it," Laura said. "I'm ready."

Cassandra's grip on her hand tightened, even as the oracle reached over Laura's body and placed her other hand on Laura's shoulder.

Laura felt the same superstitious shiver from before tiptoe down her spine. She tried to breathe evenly, to match her exhalations to the oracle's breathing or to the steady ticking of the clock on the wall. She waited to feel something, anything.

Nothing happened. There were no trumpets, no messages from the ancestors. Nothing at all.

After a few moments, Cassandra tilted her head to the side and closed her eyes.

"This might feel strange," she warned, and clamped her hand down on Laura's shoulder, tight enough to bruise.

And still... nothing.

Another minute or two passed. The clock continued to tick. Eventually, the oracle opened her eyes and let go of Laura.

"How are you feeling?" Cassandra asked.

"Fine?"

"Did you experience anything?"

"Ow?" Laura said experimentally, rolling her shoulder. The bruising where the seer had gripped seemed to extend down through the left side of her chest like a sprain. She shrugged and then arched her back, trying to dismiss the ache in her left breast.

"That's a good sign, believe it or not," Cassandra told her fondly. "You're going to be fine."

"Am I really," she muttered sarcastically. "Ow."

Cassandra smiled at her, and they wrapped up the session, and Laura agreed to check in if she felt any residual _anything_ from clearing the intergenerational baggage--but she knew she'd never call.

On her way out the door, she turned back. "Thank you."

"You're welcome, dear," the seer said, already turning to the tablet on her desk with a frown. "You're going to love Earth."

GALACTICA

48 DAYS AFTER CYLON DESTRUCTION OF THE COLONIES

There'd been a moment when Dee was walking past the Admiral's quarters one day--back before he was _the Admiral_ , but after they reunited the fleet at Kobol--and she'd heard the President's laugh, tumbling out around the corner of the open hatch, and _oh_.

Oh, _no_.

Dee had known, in a hypothetical sort of way, that President Roslin was a beautiful woman. She'd been on duty when Roslin visited the CIC. She'd heard the pilots talk about the President's legs, the occasional tasteless joke about the things someone'd like to do to their head of state.

Plenty of people had a crush on the President. Even more wanted to frak her--power fantasies, rage fantasies, whatever. Dee didn't pay much attention to that kind of talk except to steer clear of the crudest of it, and she certainly didn't waste time lusting after celebrities herself.

Even if she might have done, under other circumstances.

Roslin had a voice that perfectly suited her: warm and confident, intelligent and resolute. She was poised, sober; persuasive even when, occasionally, she was talking nonsense. But until that day in the hall outside the Admiral's quarters, Dee had never heard her laugh.

It was a remarkably lovely laugh.

Dee had paused to listen.

She wasn't usually prone to whimsy, but in that moment she'd wanted to wrap the President's laughter around her shoulders like smoke; capture it and hold it close like an ember in the dark. If she could have slipped through the hatch and turned herself into a fly on the wall for the duration of the Admiral's meeting with the President, she'd have been tempted, if it meant she could hear Roslin make that sound again.

She'd liked her laugh, okay? Even before she knew the President was her frakking soul mate, Dee had admired her, like a solar eclipse or a comet, some natural wonder glimpsed from a distance.

She was _the President_. And Dee was just... Dee.

She still couldn't make it compute.

Dee had kissed the godsdamn frakking President of the Twelve Colonies yesterday. The President had kissed her back.

Dee had all but _stalked_ the President to a restricted area, yelled at her, _then_ kissed her. And then yelled at her some more.

Frak.

"The President thinks I'm crazy," she told Lee as they jogged the corridors the next day.

"She doesn't think you're crazy."

"Well, she should!"

"You _want_ her to think you're crazy?"

"No! I don't know," she muttered under her breath.

"Do you... want me to talk to her?" Lee asked tentatively, as if he knew exactly what a terrible idea that was, but was determined to make the offer anyway.

"I think you've done enough." She grinned, jostling him with her shoulder. "But thanks, Lee. I have a plan. And if we don't all get our asses killed by Cylons in the next week, it might even work."

COLONIAL ONE / GALACTICA

ONE WEEK SINCE THE GYM

Laura was in no hurry to return to Galactica.

Oh, she dutifully boarded the raptor that carried her to her twice-weekly briefings with the Admiral, and while she was there she met with whomever the situation in the fleet called for. But she didn't contact Lieutenant Dualla--about borrowing her music collection, or anything else--and she didn't return to the gym.

And then one day she woke up with her head buzzing with tension, itching to _move_ , and she realized it had been nearly two weeks since she'd appropriated Galactica's gym and spoken with Dualla there.

She'd meant to go back. Dualla had told her to come back, echoing Bill's own invitation, and Laura thought she'd meant it. Dee was hurt--and rightly so--but under the layers of irritation, she had seemed pleased to see Laura. Or maybe that was only wishful thinking.

But you don't, after all, kiss someone and then offer to lend them irreplaceable tech if you never want to see them again. And--

 _I've thought about nothing but you since I woke up in sickbay_.

They _were_ going to sort this out. And to do that, Laura had to meet her halfway.

This time she sent a message ahead, letting Dualla know Laura would be coming aboard to meet with the Admiral about the tylium processing strikes, and that she hoped to visit the gym again when their meeting was through. Would it be convenient to take Dualla up on her offer of the uZoom?

The Lieutenant was waiting for her that evening when she reached the gym.

"No music?" Laura asked, noting Dualla's empty hands.

"I'll do you one better, Madam President," the Lieutenant said, pacing over from the back wall of the gym as the rest of the soldiers cleared out. "Have you ever worked a punching bag before?"

"I can't say that I have."

Dualla grinned. "Well, now you're gonna learn."

"Am I?"

"I have the rest of the day free. Let me teach you." She met Laura's gaze, sharp and direct, and Laura paused for a moment to consider the offer.

"All right," she said finally. "On one condition: You have to call me Laura."

Dualla frowned. "Then I guess you'd better start calling me Dee."

"I think I can manage that," Laura agreed.

Five minutes later, changed into a tee and sweatpants and with her hair pulled off her face, she faced Dee's uncomfortably blank gaze and wondered why she'd agreed to this instead of sending her perplexing soul mate on her way.

Her perplexing soul mate who had shed her jacket at some point and stood in front of Laura in uniform tanks that bared unsurprisingly toned shoulders and arms.

"You don't have to do this," Laura attempted.

"Hey, I offered," Dee said with a shrug and a hint of a smile. "It's just new."

"It is," Laura agreed. "But I made this awkward, between us."

"It would have been anyway," Dee said as she pulled out a pair of rolled bandages and deftly began wrapping Laura's hands, her fingers quick and sure. "Can you imagine if we'd figured it out when Billy had just died? Or when he was still alive?"

Laura shook her head. "I made things worse."

Dee shrugged, double-checked the wraps, and gestured her toward the bag hanging in the corner of the room. "Yeah. You did. But both of us tying ourselves in knots over it isn't getting us anywhere."

"You said you were still angry."

"I am. And I have to work on that. But you don't."

Laura frowned. That didn't seem right.

"I'm going to hold this still for you," Dee said, positioning herself behind the bag. "Go ahead and hit it as hard as you want to."

Laura raised an eyebrow. "How hard is that?"

Dee laughed. "As hard as you want!"

Laura squared up in front of Dee, brought both fists up as if to block, and then swung the right casually toward the bag.

"No, not like that," Dee tugged the bag away before Laura could make contact with it. "You're going to hurt yourself. Hold your fist looser. Don't clench. Only tighten it up as you impact the bag. Less risk of an injury that way."

Laura tried again, doing her best to keep all of that in mind. Holding her hand loose felt unnatural, but she clenched just as her fist hit the side of the bag and it felt... huh. It felt good.

Dee nodded when Laura looked at her. "I'm surprised you haven't used a punching bag before."

"Why? What is it about being a high school teacher and then accidentally President of the Colonies that screams _knows how to work a heavy bag_?"

"Oh, well. _That_ , for starters," Dee said, dropping the bag and moving around it to adjust Laura's stance. "You know the difference between a heavy bag and a speed bag. And I know you like boxing."

" _Oh._ " Laura felt her cheeks heat and she wasn't sure whether it was thanks to Dee's hands on her hips, tweaking her posture, or her memories of that day--giddy, effervescent. She'd let down her guard, let herself pretend the fleet's survival wasn't on her shoulders. She'd _tried to flirt with her soul mate_ , for goodness' sake, using tired old boxing jingles--tried to flirt with _Dee_.

"My father loved boxing," Laura admitted, making contact with the heavy bag again while Dee went back to hold it steady. "The sport, the athletes, he was crazy about all of it. We used to watch the fights together. But he never boxed, and neither did I."

From behind the bag, Dee asked, "Would you like to?"

"Not really. I can think of a few people I wouldn't mind giving a black eye, but I'm not sure I could take what they'd dish out in return."

"I think boxing for sport is insane," Dee said after a moment. "I was annoyed with everyone that day, during the dance, and then I was annoyed with you for enjoying it."

"It's awful, isn't it?" Laura agreed cheerfully. "Brutal and bloody and all of our worst impulses. But it's thrilling, as well."

"If you say so. I prefer other thrills."

She couldn't see Dee's expression as she said it, but that was probably for the best since Laura shivered at the words alone.

She thought about how easy it would be to step around the heavy bag, to fall into Dee's arms and kiss her again. She wondered if she'd be welcome if she did.

She stayed where she was and kept on punching the damn bag.

And then she heard herself say, "Come back with me to Colonial One."

"What?" Dee sounded genuinely confused. "Why?"

Laura's hands fell still against the punching bag. "Because I want to kiss you, and I want to do it in a room that doesn't smell like a jock strap."

Dee laughed. "Oh my gods, the President just said _jock strap_."

"Come on. Let me wine and dine you--no wine, of course, and the food's the same algae slop you've got here, but--"

"All right," Dee said, still laughing. "You've got a weak sales pitch, Madam Presid--Laura. But all right."

"Give me twenty minutes," Dee said, and immediately regretted it.

Twenty minutes? To get dressed for... was it wrong to think of it as a date with the President? Gods bless. She was _frakked_.

But the President shook her head. "I don't know about you, but I'm planning to take advantage of a working shower before we leave Galactica," she said. "You're free to take all the time you need."

 _All the time you need_ was almost worse than Dee's original _twenty minutes_ , because it left her struggling to guess, with nonexistent data, just how long Laura Roslin might be taking to shower, dress, and return to the flight deck.

Naturally--because gods forbid any part of this go smoothly--by the time Dee made it to the head, she discovered that Blue Squadron had just come off a training run, and the line for the shower stalls was almost out the door. Frak. Double frak.

It was times like this that she missed her own private quarters on Pegasus.

When she got through the line, of course, Starbuck jumped in front of her and stole her shower, sticking her with the busted faucet whose temp and water pressure still hadn't been fixed--gods damn it, Kara. Dee soaped up frantically, imagining the President already waiting for her on the flight deck, a raptor crew lounging around impatiently, and--

Holy frak. The President was waiting. _For_ _her_.

She bit back a curse and made short work of lathering up her hair and rinsing under the tepid trickle.

Exactly six minutes later, she was staring into her locker in blind panic--what the frak did you _wear_ to a date with the _President_ of the Twelve frakking _Colonies_? She'd ask Lee, but their rest cycles had never lined up since the Pegasus--he was probably out with Green Squadron right now and, anyway, _she had no damn time_.

Not for the first time, she found herself grateful that her off-duty wardrobe consisted of three tops, a dress, a skirt, and a pair of slacks that never needed pressing, because the scant selection meant she could close her eyes and grab the first thing she touched, slap on light makeup, and be out the door in another five minutes.

She jogged from her duty locker to the hangar, weaving through crowded hallways, and slipped past the open hatch to the flight deck only to find it all but deserted.

Thank the gods. She'd made it to the raptor first.

"I hope I haven't kept you waiting," were Roslin's first words as she crossed the flight deck, smiling warmly at Dee. She was once again impeccably put together, and Dee was once again more than a little starstruck.

Dee smiled back helplessly. "That's all right."

"Good." Roslin cleared her throat and gestured Dee up the ramp. "Well. Be my guest."

The flight to Galactica was... weird, but somehow less awkward for knowing that the President felt just as uncomfortable as Dee did. There were plenty of things that weren't level between them--age and rank for a start--but their mutual fumbling sure felt like an equalizer.

"You don't have to worry," Dee said, as they were pulling into Colonial One's landing bay. "We can just talk."

Roslin shot her a skeptical look. "Shouldn't I be the one reassuring you?"

"Why?" Dee asked, suddenly feeling playful. "We're both bad at this, except you're obviously worse."

The President choked. " _What?_ "

"You heard me," Dee told her with a grin. "I said you're terrible at this."

"Is that so?" Roslin asked softly, almost carefully, and Dee wondered for a terrified second whether she'd messed up--and then realized, in a flash of insight, that Roslin might not have anyone in her life who dared to tease the President. Was there anyone left who cared about her as a person, and not a figurehead?

Maybe the Admiral, she thought. After all, he made her laugh.

Then the President smiled and Dee lost her train of thought.

"Well," Roslin said, with a sidelong glance, "you're welcome to head straight back to Galactica if that's how you feel. Hell, we can turn this raptor right around now--"

Dee started giggling because _what the frak were they doing--_ and then the President started snickering, too, and by the time Racetrack shot a puzzled look back at them from the cockpit they were both wheezing into their seatbelts with laughter.

Racetrack winked at Dee, which only set her off again--oh _no_ , the rumour mill was probably already raging before she'd even boarded the raptor--and by the time she'd caught her breath, they were touching down gently inside Colonial One.

The hatch opened, Racetrack saluted casually, and Dee followed the President out of the raptor, down the length of the hangar, and up a staircase to the main level of the ship.

"Madam President--" she began as they rounded the last curve in the stairs.

"Laura," the President corrected without looking back.

"Laura," Dee agreed. "Not to put too fine a point on it, but what--"

"Hold on a moment," Roslin told her. "I want to make sure we won't be interrupted by anything short of a real emergency. Give me a few minutes to speak to Tory and I'll be all yours."

"Well, when you put it that way--"

Roslin--Laura--flashed a quick smile at her. "Have a seat. I'll be right back."

With Roslin out of the room, Dee perched on the edge of an overstuffed chair in front of the Presidential desk and wondered what she was going to do if this all went badly.

Dee had been posting to fleet message boards and, frankly, _pining_ for her jerk of a soul mate for years, and now that she had her she didn't have the first clue what to do with her... except to keep moving forward and hope it didn't blow up in both their faces.

She wanted to be angry at Laura--if _anyone_ in the fleet had the resources to find her soul mate, it was the frakking President--but she couldn't keep up the effort. She'd been angry, but she wasn't any more. What she felt now was how scared she was to let Laura in, just as Laura had felt all along--as if keeping each other at arm's length was going to make any difference.

As if it wasn't going to break her heart if something happened to the President now, or if Roslin decided she didn't want Dee after all.

When the President--when Laura--walked back through the curtain a few minutes later and smiled at her--well.

Dee wasn't an impulsive person. She liked to look before she leapt, and then she'd look again on the way down in case she needed to reassess her landing. Dee was practical. She was smart. She thought things through.

But, "You look beautiful," Roslin said.

Dee was on her feet and moving into Laura's space before she could think, cupping the President's cheek and going up on her toes to kiss her.

They'd kissed before, but this one felt like a first kiss, too. Too brief, too soft, over too soon. Dee heard Roslin huff in surprise as she drew back--

And then the President reeled her in and kissed her again, and _yes_. Kissing your soul mate really _was_ different from kissing anyone else.

There were sparkles flickering to life inside her head, in the space where Roslin's voice lived, and a cascade of sensations: Sunshine at the tips of her fingers. Pollen dusting the air. Butter melting perfectly into toast. A dragonfly, opening prismatic wings.

Dee ran her fingers up the back of Roslin's neck and tangled them in her hair, deepening the kiss. The President's lips were soft and she was a better kisser than she had any right to be. Dee felt a shiver of arousal flare in her belly as she tangled her other hand in the back of Roslin's jacket.

"Where the frak are you getting raspberry lip balm, anyway?" The President--no, Laura, damn it-- pulled away to ask. Her voice was low, raw, and absolutely _riveting_.

Dee shivered. "Probably the same place you get your makeup?"

"What, Tory's wizardry?" Laura said archly. "She swears she's trading for it legally and I don't ask her for details."

"You're ridiculous," Dee told her.

"And you're _shaking_ ," Laura said, reaching for her in concern.

Oh, gods. She _was_. "I'm sorry--"

"Don't be," Laura said, tugging her forward. "Come here."

Laura's arms came around her again and pulled her in, holding her close. Despite her stiff presidential layers, she radiated body heat.

"I'm overwhelmed, too," Laura said.

Dee scoffed.

Laura squeezed her arm in rebuttal. "You know I am."

"I know." Dee sagged as the tension left her body and let herself lean, just a little, on Laura's warmth.

"I'm bad at this," Laura muttered above Dee's head, raw and honest. And then a grin slipped into her voice as she added, "Really terrible. Much worse than you are."

Dee laughed and held on tight.

Laura twitched as Dee ran her fingers down the tendons on the back of Laura's hand. "Can I ask you something?"

They'd relocated to a sofa with a partial view of the fleet through Colonial One's tiny passenger windows. Dee sat tucked into Laura's side, her head resting on Laura's shoulder. It was the most intimate Laura had been with anyone since before the attacks; she could feel her wall of resolve and half of her coping mechanisms melting into goo and slipping away, which should probably trouble her a lot more than it did. Though, as a matter of fact--

Dee's fingers paused and she turned to look up at Laura. "Hmm?"

"Tell me you're not just here because the gods accidentally stuck you with me?"

"Of course I am," Dee said, and the bottom fell out of Laura's stomach. Dee went rigid in alarm and sat up, putting distance between them even as she squeezed Laura's wrist. "That's not--I didn't mean that the way it sounds."

"I'm listening."

Dee frowned. "Do you think--how can you think I would ever in a million years have been pushy enough to make a pass at _the President of the Twelve Colonies_? No matter how stunning you are--don't make that face, you know what you look like--no matter how amazing you are, there's no frakking way I would ever have had the nerve. I'm just an officer. It was never going to happen."

Laura was smiling reluctantly by the end of this madness. "That's ridiculous. You're not _just_ anything."

"Thank you." Dee shook her head, leaning back into the loveseat. "But you're still the President and our _humble leader_."

Laura shook her head. "Not here, I'm not."

Dee looked pointedly down the room at Laura's desk, the paraphernalia of office, the whiteboard on the wall with its ever-fluctuating number.

Her soul mate was a _smartass_ and Laura loved it. "Oh, you know what I meant. Stop that."

Dee grinned up at her, impish and charming. "Yes, Ma'am."

"And don't call me _Ma'am_. It makes me feel ancient."

"Please," Dee said skeptically, tucking her legs under her and turning to face Laura. "You're barely older than I am."

" _Excuse_ me?"

Dee met her eyes with a frown. "Did I say something wrong?"

"Dee," Laura said seriously, "I'm at least two decades older than you."

Dee _snorted_. "Has that been bothering you, all this time? Because you absolutely aren't."

"You can't be more than twenty-six. Twenty-two?"

" _What?_ Did you seriously--" Dee started giggling. It was _adorable_. "Do you want me to be _twenty-two_? Does the thought of despoiling some innocent kid fresh out of military college do it for you, Madam President?"

"Gods." Laura felt her entire face flush red. "Of course not!"

"Of course not," Dee echoed, still cackling. "Frak, you're beautiful."

Laura shook her head, delighted despite herself. But more importantly-- "So you're not twenty-two. How old are you, then?"

"Thirty-six."

She couldn't quite stop the gasp from slipping out. "No."

"All right," Dee shrugged. "Then don't believe me. How old are _you_?"

"Forty-eight."

"See?" Dee smirked. "Twelve years is barely anything. Nothing to worry about."

"Nothing to--

Dee started giggling again, grabbing Laura's shoulder for support.

"You really--" she wheezed. "You really thought I was twenty-two!"

"Of course you're not twenty-two, I can do basic math," Laura muttered, remembering children's rhymes flickering to life inside her head when she was barely more than a child herself. And then, intelligently, "But you were dating Billy when I met you!"

"Well, that's true," Dee said, sobering at the reminder. Her hand slid down Laura's shoulder to squeeze her arm. "But I'm not anymore. I'm here now."

"I'm glad," Laura said, against every impulse that told her to keep the feelings bubbling up inside her chest a secret, and tangled her fingers with Dee's again.

(The fewer people who figured out that Laura Roslin had a heart, the better. But maybe Dee already knew, or at least had an inkling.)

Dee looked her in the eyes and seemed aware of exactly how much effort those two words had cost. "I think we're lucky."

Laura's breath caught. "Lucky?"

Dee looked down at their joined hands. "We get to have this."

GALACTICA

THREE MONTHS LATER

"We have to get them to sit down and talk to each other," Dee said, all but towing Lee toward the Admiral's quarters.

"The President has to see reason. Once she hears what Kara saw of Earth--"

"Don't you mean, once Starbuck takes a minute to answer Laura's godsdamn questions about how--"

The look on Lee's face was priceless--frustrated and amused and panicked and dear--and Dee couldn't help the giggle that slipped out against her will. Lee stared at her, aggravated anew--

And suddenly she was full on laughing, and Lee was snickering, too, and they were propping each other up in the middle of one of Galactica's most hectic hallways while what felt like half the ship's complement flooded past, shooting them judgmental glares.

Dee laid her head on Lee's shoulder and wheezed until she found the words. "Maybe we need to start by taking a minute to get our own stories in order."

"Maybe we do."

She straightened up again. "I'm glad Kara's back. I'm really happy for you."

"She's been to Earth," Lee told her earnestly. "We have to convince--"

"I know. I believe you."

"Then you believe _Kara_."

Dee pulled a face at him. "All right. I believe Kara. Can we get the frak on with this?"

"Yes, yep, let's move."

"You're sure Laura's with the Admiral now?"

"Yes, and we should--"

"Right--"

"Do you think this is going to work?" Laura asked Dee, later. The Admiral, Lee, and Starbuck had departed for the CIC and the two of them were left alone in the Admiral's quarters, poring over Starbuck's photos of Earth. "Or are we headed into a trap?"

Dee looked up from the star charts. "Does it matter what I think?"

"To me?" Laura said. "Yes. Of course it matters."

Dee let herself sit for a moment with the knowledge that Laura--her soul mate, the godsdamned President of the Twelve Colonies--trusted her so completely.

Dee shrugged. "Do I think Starbuck's really Starbuck and that she knows the way to Earth? Against all logic... yeah, I really do."

Laura sighed. "I'm so tired of all this."

"Yeah."

"I don't trust Starbuck as far as I can throw her."

"I'm not Starbuck's biggest fan," Dee admitted, "but I believe her. Something weird is going on, something like your prophecies and visions. But I don't think Starbuck's playing us."

"Hmm," Laura mused. "You know, I'm never sure, once you and Lee start tag-teaming a problem like this, whether you really mean everything you're saying or you're just backing each other up."

"What?" Dee sat up sharply, dislodging the pen she'd jammed behind her ear half an hour ago. She fumbled for it one-handed as it fell. "I disagree with Lee _all the frakking time_."

Laura shot her a skeptical look, scornful and patronizing and _blindingly hot_ , and Dee wanted to _eat her with a spoon_.

"Don't _do_ that," she said.

"Do what?"

"Look at me like I'm an idiot," Dee glared, "and also like you're planning to win the argument by distracting me with how hot you are."

"What. That's not. Dee--"

But Dee was already pushing the maps aside and settling herself in Laura's lap.

"They're going to be back," Laura warned her. "Any minute."

They were going to be _at least_ an hour in the CIC. But. "Then we'd better be quick."

"I am _not_ having sex with you in Bill Adama's living room," Laura muttered against her lips as Dee nipped in to kiss her.

"Shhhhh. Who said--" she planted a flurry of kisses up Laura's neck, "--anything about--" and licked around the shell of her ear,"--sex?"

Laura groaned, her hands coming up to clutch at Dee's hips. Dee squirmed against her.

"Come on," Dee said, licking her way back down Laura's throat and popping the first few buttons of her blouse to kiss into the vee of her cleavage. "You know me well enough to know that the only person I support unconditionally, whether he's right or wrong, is my CO."

That wasn't true--not any more--but Laura was probably too distracted to call her on it.

"You mean to tell me--" Laura panted, her fingers finding their way under the hem of Dee's tanks and dancing up her sides, her stomach, dipping under her waistband, palming her ass, "--that you never disagreed with Lee when he was your CO."

"Oh, no," Dee said innocently, pausing in her route across Laura's breasts to draw back and look her in the eyes. "All the damn time."

Laura laughed explosively, like she just couldn't help herself, and it was still the most wonderful thing Dee had ever heard--and this time Dee was right in the middle of it, Dee was the one who had cracked her impenetrable facade, and nothing had ever been so good as kneeling in Laura's lap as she made her laugh in the midst of their latest frakking crisis.

And then Laura pulled her into a kiss--fierce, eager, demanding. Her hand was on the back of Dee's neck as she licked into Dee's mouth, and, oh. _Oh_. Dee pressed down into her body, grinding their hips together, and felt the echo of a single, bright tone spark to life inside her thoughts; a clear, happy note like a gong had been struck in a distant room.

"I love you," Laura said, when she broke the kiss.

"I--" Of all the times she could have--she was going to do this _now_? In the middle of a strategy session, right after a Cylon attack, _in the Admiral's quarters_ , what the _frak_ , Laura. "Now? You love me _now_?"

"I love you, now."

"Gods." Dee shook her head in dismay. "I love you, too."

Laura grinned up at her, smug and gorgeous and only slightly disheveled, and all Dee could think to do was kiss her again.


End file.
